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SISTERS OF THE EARTH -- WOMEN'S PROSE & POETRY ABOUT NATURE |
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Healing Her: WALKING IN BALANCE WITH NATURE My deepest longing is to live in a world that respects life in every form, a world whose people have a fierce love of and loyalty to the earth and their particular place thereon. The world we live in is not that world, but it could be. To get there from here, we need to recognize that our own well-being is intimately connected to the well-being of the land and of other creatures. All of us -- men as well as women -- need to bring to bear in our daily lives the qualities that women traditionally have been encouraged to develop: caring, concern for future generations, protectiveness and responsibility toward lives besides our own, gentleness, tenderness, patience, sensitivity, nurturance, reverence for life, aesthetic intuition, receptivity. These are the qualities that have been so lacking in our culture's relationship to nature. The writing that follows explores ways of being that might allow us to walk once again in balance with nature. These writers make one thing clear: the change we are required to make is radical, and it must happen both within our hearts and in our actions. We cling to our societal bad habits only at our very great peril. There is a different path; these women show us the way. Barbara Deming (1917-1984) described herself as a radical pacifist lesbian feminist and sought to embrace all life with care and concern. Born in New York and educated at Bennington College (B.A.) and Case Western Reserve University (M.A.), she was inspired by reading Gandhi to become active in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and she eventually published six books on issues of women and peace, feminism and nonviolence. Her work was about healing by acknowledging our anger at the wounds inflicted by patriarchy. She saw an awakening into feminist consciousness, the awakening she prays for in "Spirit of Love," from We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (1984), as an absolute necessity for the continuation of life on earth. SPIRIT OF LOVE Spirit of love Spirit that cracks
our single selves -- Spirit that hears
each one of us, Ecofeminist theologian Elizabeth Dodson Gray (born 1929) has in her work woven together environmentalist and futurist concerns with Christian ethics and theology. In books and lectures she has identified patriarchy as "the seedbed of the fatal need to rank diversity" that she believes is at the root of the ecological crisis, and she has called on the Christian church to "repent of dominion," or the idea that humans (and in particular, human males) are at the top of and in charge of a hierarchy of being. The mother of two children, she is co-director with her husband, David Gray, of the Bolton Institute for a Sustainable Future in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which publishes books, does environmental projects for government and industry, and does public educational outreach. Since 1978, she has been the coordinator of the Theological Opportunities Program at Harvard Divinity School, a lecture series on topics growing out of women's life experience. Her book Green Paradise Lost (1979), an early classic of environmental ethics and the source of the following excerpt, is essentially her answer to the question, Why did we ever think it was OK to do what we've done to the earth? Gray is also the author of Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap (1982) and the editor of Sacred Dimensions of Women's Experience (1988). She would like to see women "lead the way into a new kind of responsive dialogue that enlarges the circle from the human family to include the real other dancers in our dance of life on this planet." TURNING TO ANOTHER WAY In the ancient days a solemn council was called to consider the origin of death. Great men, movers of empires and corporations, assembled to debate the question. "Death came with our bodies," they said. "Our natural world, of which our bodies are a part, is full of death. Only our minds and spirits are immortal, akin to the gods. And that is why we sharpen our minds and toughen our spirits, and gird up the loins of our souls to be heroic, to project such a magnificent trajectory of a life-span that we conquer the ignominy of our beginnings in the blood and humanness of childbirth, and the dependence of childhood, as well as the humiliation of our endings in the weakness of old age and the blotting-out of death." As the men talked, they paced the floor and filled the air with their dreams of glory. Great martial adventures, great philosophical and theological systems, great scientific and technological advances, achievements of epic proportions were planned and executed with courage and strength and daring which surely would conquer the beginnings and the endings of man. "We are like gods," the men rhapsodized as they erected. "We are a little lower than the angels, and all other creatures who do not erect as we do, are below us and subject to us. All of nature itself, like the ground we walk upon, will reverberate to the majesty of our footprints upon the sands of time." But a funny thing happened as the men worked. Some of the vast heroic enterprises, instead of conquering death, began to cause it. Toxic substances, iron laws of economics, megaton killbacks, and blank-faced robot machines began to stalk the earth and "hunt for humans" like demented snipers of the rooftop. Benign Mother Nature turned on her children with murderous ferocity, slowly choking off the air and water which had flowed freely from her abused breasts. Men were cast back upon the despised dependence of their infantile memories. "This is intolerable!" the men cried out. "We cannot live as we desire. We cannot control the world and all that in it lies. If we live like this, we die and the world dies with us. But not to live like this, not to control and subdue the world, is still worse for us than death! What shall we do? Who shall we kill to make it right?" In the silence that followed, an old woman sitting in the corner knitting clothes for her grandchildren finally spoke. "You men live your lives in agonies of striving, you kill and take the world with you. And for what? You do not know who you are. Always you try to escape your bodies, to put down your flesh, to conquer nature, and where does it get you? He who cannot deal with his birth from a woman, cannot deal with his death. Life comes from death, and death is in life. They are all of a piece." The men stared at her in disbelief. What could this woman, this other-than-man, know of life or death? Only men cast their cosmologies out upon reality; their metaphors of dualism and hierarchy had etched the ontological skies for so long that they seemed embedded in truth itself. Could it be that there was another way to perceive? Another standing point? Could it be that erection itself had betrayed them into thinking linearly about everything? Could it be that they had missed the basic metaphor of life? "All right," the men taunted her, "you tell us a story. You tell us about the beginning and the ending, and about the meaning of the middle of life. You tell us." "I am not like you," the old woman said slowly. "I do not tell stories. I see visions. I see that life is not a line but a circle. Why do men imagine for themselves the illusory freedom of a soaring mind, so that the body of nature becomes a cage? 'Tis not true. To be human is to be circled in the cycles of nature, rooted in the processes that nurture us in life, breathing in and breathing out human life just as plants breathe in and out their photosynthesis. Why do men see themselves as apart from this, or above this? Is it that the natural reproductive processes surge so little through their bodies that they cannot feel their unity with nature in their blood and tissue and bones as women can? Or is it that they so envy and fear women for their more integral part in nature that they seek to escape from both women and nature into a fantasy world of culture which they themselves can control because they made it up?" The men roared in anger. "How dare you question the world which we have made, woman, you who were not made by God but made from our rib! We have given birth to you! How could we possibly think that we were born of you, or envy you, or fear you? It is against all rational thought!" But the old woman merely looked at them and said, "To be human is to be born, partake of life, and die. Life itself is the gift. It does not have to be wrenched out of shape, trying to deny both the borning and the dying. Women produce children, and they and the children die. But they know that it was good to have lived. Perhaps someday men too can rest upon the affirmation of being, and there find reassurance and an end to their ceaseless striving. Perhaps someday they shall come to know the circle which is the whole -- that which validates being -- without achieving, that which allows one to rest and stop running, that which accepts one as a person and not a hero. The sweet nectar of that whole awaits you in the precious flower of the Now, not in your dreams of glory. Perhaps, someday, men will find their humanity, and give up their divinity." The old woman had finished speaking and there was silence in the great council room. It was a time for silence. "Realizing the importance of nature as a subject was a slow process of conversion for me," writes Alison Hawthorne Deming (born 1946). The great-great-granddaughter of the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, she was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in a "culturally privileged" family in rural Avon. When she was eight, her family first vacationed on Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, Canada, and bought a house there to which Deming has returned nearly every summer since, letting herself be tutored by the natural world on the island. An unplanned pregnancy at eighteen derailed her college career and forced her into a series of jobs far removed from her desire to be a writer, but she managed to support herself and her daughter while also developing her skills as a poet and essayist. She eventually earned an M.F.A from Vermont College, was awarded writing fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at Stanford University, and became a full- time professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona in 2000 after a decade spent directing the Poetry Center there. Her work has been published in three collections of essays and three of poetry, as well as in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies. A primary theme in her writing, reflected in the following poem from Science and Other Poems (1994), is "reconstructing an intimacy with nature" in a time of radical loss. Pomegranates fell
from the trees There was no
glorified past It's here,
I kept telling him, Brooke Medicine Eagle (born 1943) combines training in the Northern Plains Indian medicine path and in Western ways of healing in her unique work as an author, sacred ecologist, teacher of Earth wisdom, and ceremonial leader. She is dedicated to "bringing forward the ancient truths concerning how to live a fully human life in harmony with All Our Relations as we approach "the crossroads into a golden age" (www.medicineeagle.com). Born of Sioux and Nez Perce ancestry and raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, she undertook ritual training in her twenties with a Northern Cheyenne medicine woman, part of which involved going out on the vision quest described in the following selection (originally published in Shamanic Voices, edited by Joan Halifax, 1979). Medicine Eagle also studied at the University of Denver (B.A. in psychology and math) and Mankato State University (M.A. in counseling psychology). She is helping to establish an educational foundation and sustainable community known as Sacred Ground International, runs wilderness camps in Montana to bring people to appreciate the spirit alive in Mother Earth, and is the author of a spiritual autobiography, Buffalo Woman Comes Singing (1991), and The Last Ghost Dance (2000), on the practices of Earth magic and ascending into our greater humanity. She writes, "Our generation has the opportunity and challenge of making real on Earth a way of life which brings the age of harmony, abundance, and peace foreseen by the old ones: the Good Red Road where the Tree of Life blossoms again." THE RAINBOW BRIDGE My initiatory vision quest was done with my teacher, Stands Near the Fire, an eighty-year-old Cheyenne woman who was the keeper of a sacred lodge whose sacred object represents the Renewing Power of the Feminine. She and a young medicine woman took me to the centuries-old fasting, vision-questing place of the Sioux and Cheyenne, Bear Butte, located in the plains country that goes up into the Black Hills. The traditional way is to fast and cleanse oneself bodily, emotionally, and psychically; then to go atop a sacred mountain for four days and nights wearing only a breechcloth and carrying a buffalo robe, staying there without food or water, praying for vision. This is the kind of quest that I did. The younger medicine woman took me up the butte. She prepared and blessed a bed of sagebrush on a very rocky hill halfway up the mountain. This was to be my bed. After we smoked a pipe and offered prayers, she painted me and left me. So I spent the time there fasting and praying for vision. *** Several days and nights have passed and it is again just after twilight. Up here on the mountain, I can look down over the country. There's a lake down below me; in the far distance are the Black Hills, and I can see the lights of Rapid City. A few small clouds are drifting across the sky, but it is relatively warm, the late fall. I'm lying, comfortable and peaceful even on the sharp rocks, remembering the evening we arrived and the half rainbow that arched across the sky to my right, accenting the golden light on the prairie. Suddenly there appears beside me a woman, older than me, but not really an old woman. She's dressed very simply in buckskin, and I'm surprised she doesn't have beading on her dress. She has raven black hair in long braids. As she stands there beside me, she begins to speak to me. Her message comes clearly through, but not in my ears. It's as though she's feeding something in at my navel, and it comes up through all of me; I can interpret part of it in words but not all of it. It just keeps flowing in and filling up my whole being. So the words that I have put to it are my own, and I have discovered more and more of what she told me as time has gone on. The little clouds that are over the moon move off, and as they move away, the moonlight shining on her dress creates a flurry of rainbows, and I see that her dress is beaded with crystal beads, hundreds of tiny crystal beads; the slightest movement she makes sends those flurries of soft rainbows all over. About this time, something else starts to happen. Down off the high part of the mountain, lights begin to come, and I hear soft drumbeats begin, very soft. Descending in a slow, gentle dance step are the old women spirits of that mountain, ancient gray-haired women, Indian women, dancing down. They either are light or carry light as they wind down the trail and circle the hill I am on. As they dance around in a circle, very quickly into that circle comes another circle, this one of young women of my age and time, young women that I know, and they, too, are dancing. Those two rings are dancing and moving, and then they begin to weave in and out of each other, sway in and out of each other, blending. Then inside that circle comes another circle of seven old grandmothers, white-haired women, women who are significant to me, powerful and nurturing old women. Again inside comes a circle of seven young women, friends and sisters to me, weaving and swaying, blending with the grandmothers. In the Indian tradition, there is a wonderful amount of humor. And the humor comes when all this very solemn, very slow and beautiful ceremony is taking place. Running off the mountain, with her hair flying, is a special friend of mine. She's typically late, a very high person and quite unpredictable. Into the circle, stopping breathless beside the Rainbow Woman, trying to appear nonchalant, comes Diane, carrying on her left hand a dove. The Rainbow Woman looks down on me and says, "Her name is Moon Dove," and smiles. Diane then lets the dove fly, swirling high into the sky, and all around me disappears except the Rainbow Woman, standing radiant beside me. She reminds me that the Mother Earth is in trouble, her renewing powers threatened, and that here on this land, this Turtle Island, this North American land, what needs to happen is a balancing. The thrusting, aggressive, analytic, building, making-it- happen energy has seriously over-balanced the feminine, receptive, allowing, harmonizing, intuitive energy. She says that what must happen is an uplifting and a balancing -- more emphasis on surrendering, being receptive, nurturing all the people, using the inexhaustible resources within us rather than raping and tearing the Mother Earth. She speaks to me as a woman, and I am to carry this message to women specifically, to reawaken their profound intuitive, protective, nurturing natures. But not only do women need to become strong in this way; we all need to do this, men and women alike. Women are born more naturally receptive and nurturing; that's what being a woman in this body is about. But even the women in our society don't do that very well. None of us have ever been taught that way. We know how to do something; we know how to make something, how to exert effort; but we need to allow, to be receptive, listen to the Earth, find the Universal knowledge and ancient truths within ourselves, to surrender and serve. Each of us must find that balance, heal ourselves, become whole. Another thing she relates is that we on this North American continent are all children of the rainbow, all of us; we are primarily mixed-bloods. And especially to me she is speaking, saying that she feels I will be a carrier of the message between the two cultures, across the rainbow bridge, from the old culture to the new, from the Indian to the dominant society, bridging any and all gaps. And in a sense, all of us in this generation can be that. We can help construct, using the full potential of ourselves, that bridge into the new age, creating a beautiful abundant life for all. These are the kinds of things she reminds me of, and asks me to remind others of -- about clearing ourselves to allow love and light to come through us, through our hearts. And when she finishes her message, she stands quietly for a moment. Then, her feet staying where they are, she shoots out across the sky in a rainbow arc that covers the heavens. Slowly the lights that formed the rainbow begin to die out, fall like fireworks from the sky, die out from her feet and die out and fade. She is gone and I am looking into the moon-lighted sky. *** When I awoke the next morning, in the left-hand portion of the sky was the completion of the half rainbow that I had seen as I arrived here. For days and days after that, rainbows kept appearing in my life, one a magnificent triple rainbow the likes of which I had never before witnessed. *** I knew few women who are on the path of the shaman, and yet, this is my way. I was raised on the Crow Reservation in Montana. My blood is primarily Sioux and Nez Perce. The Indian tradition was very much hidden when I was growing up; however, I have gotten back more and more to the ancient ways. This happened as I began to have visions; I was drawn back to the old ways by them. I did not choose it outwardly; it came as I released old ways of being, its irresistible call bringing me home. About the quest for vision, the traditional Indians prayed always thus: "Not only for myself do I ask this, Grandfather, Great Spirit, but that the people may live, the people may live." Any of us can dream, but seeking vision is always done not only to heal and fulfill one's own potential, but also to learn to use that potential to serve all our relations: the two-leggeds, the four- leggeds, the wingeds, those that crawl upon the Earth, and the Mother Earth herself. I feel my purpose is to help in any way I can to heal the Earth; we are in a time when Our Mother is in dire need of healing. We see it everywhere: the droughts, earthquakes, storms, and pollution. Yes, Mother Earth needs our nurturance. My mission is to heal, to make whole, to pay attention to that wholeness not only in ourselves but in all that is. The Indian people are the people of the heart. The finest of my elders remind me that being Indian is an attitude, a state of mind, a way of being in harmony with all things and all beings. It is allowing the heart to be the distributor of energy on this planet: to allow feelings and sensitivities to determine where energy goes; bringing aliveness up from the Earth and down from the Sky, pulling it in and giving it out from the heart, the very center of one's being. That is the Indian way. When the white man came to this land he brought the intellect, the analytic way of being, which has become dominant. The prophecies say that when those two come together and balance, the new age will begin. It has only been a couple hundred years since that coming together and we are all becoming natives here. Our dominant society and education give us the way of the Mind; the way of the Heart is being born from the very land itself into our cells and genes. We are that blend; we are those children of whom Rainbow Woman spoke. We are the ones who will make the vision real. And the time is now. Many different traditions tell us of four or five worlds that have been, and say that the Creator made all these worlds with one simple law: That we shall be in harmony and balance with all things and all beings. Time and time again people have destroyed that harmony; we have destroyed that harmony, and have done it needlessly. This is the last world, our last chance to prove that we can live peaceably upon the Earth. We must achieve a clarity and lack of resistance as we seek vision -- a surrendering, a relinquishing. If we are unwilling to be in our experience now, then vision will not open for us. We need to get on that circle where there is no resistance, no up, no down, where there are no square corners to hide in or stumble on. Then, someday, we become that circle. *** This is dedicated to Stands Near the Fire, the Woman Who Knows Everything, who went to "the beyond-country" a few hours after I was with her on January 3, 1980. With her passing, an era ended. May she find clear water and buffalo there, and live with them forever in perpetual summer. Paula Gunn Allen (born 1939) is a poet, novelist, educator, and scholar of Native American literature whose worldview is rooted in the woman-centered tradition of the Pueblo Indian culture. She describes herself as a "multicultural event," having been born of Pueblo/Sioux/Lebanese/Scottish-American ancestry in Albuquerque and raised Catholic in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish-Mexican land-grant village adjoining the Laguna and Acoma reservations. She attended the University of Oregon (B.A., M.F.A.) and the University of New Mexico (Ph.D.) and has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, where she was a full professor of English until her retirement in 1999. In the nearly twenty works that she has authored or edited -- including eight volumes of poetry, a novel, and a book of essays -- she has attempted to integrate the varying influences in her life, draw attention to the healing power of the oral tradition embodied in contemporary Native American literature, and explore women's history of leadership and relationship to the sacred in Native American cultures. Her The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986) is a pioneering work of feminist scholarship, and she won an American Book Award in 1990 for Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. She has been active in the antiwar and antinuclear movements, has three grown children from two marriages, and now lives in Berkeley, California. The following poem (from Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back, edited by Joseph Bruchac, 1984) exemplifies Allen's spirit-informed view of the universe. KOPIS'TAYA (A GATHERING OF SPIRITS) Because we live in
the browning season Because we live in
the hard-edged season, We are the women
of daylight; of clocks and steel Even so, the
spirit voices are singing, Author, teacher, and activist Starhawk (born 1951) has dedicated her life and work to articulating an ecofeminist spirituality and putting it into political action in the world. (www.starhawk.org). She is the best-known teacher and practitioner of the Old Religion of the Goddess, or Witchcraft, and her The Spiral Dance (1979) is the most influential text of contemporary Paganism. She explains there that Witchcraft "takes its teachings from nature, and reads inspiration in the movements of the sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, the slow growth of trees, and the cycle of the seasons." Born Miriam Simos in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at UCLA (B.A. in fine arts) and Antioch West (M.A. in psychology), she was an organizer in her high school during the days of the Vietnam War and since then has organized, trained protestors, and been on the front lines of numerous antinuclear, antiwar, and anti-globalization actions. Starhawk is a cofounder of the Reclaiming Tradition, which offers classes, public rituals, and training in earth-based spirituality and activism. She is the author or coauthor of nine books, including Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (1982), Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery (1987), and Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (2002). In her classic ecotopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993), which begins with the selection that follows, she turned to fiction to explore her vision of a future in which an earthbased culture that celebrates women's realities struggles against a totalitarian regime. Starhawk lives part-time in San Francisco in a collective house with her partner and friends, and part-time in a little hut in the woods in western Sonoma County, where she works on environmental and land use issues, practices permaculture in her extensive gardens, and writes. She travels widely in America and Europe giving lectures and workshops. DECLARATION OF THE FOUR SACRED THINGS The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives. Author, editor, creative writing teacher, and lecturer Beth Brant (born 194r), whose Mohawk name is Degonwadonti, speaks in her work for traditional Native American values and against racism, homophobia, and colonization in all its forms. For her, words are sacred and writing is medicine that has cooled the pain and anger of her life as a native woman and lesbian. She was born in Melvindale, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, the daughter of a Mohawk father, who was an assembly line worker for the Ford Motor Company, and a Scots-Irish mother. Her Mohawk grandparents told her stories from the native tradition while the family lived with them in Detroit. Brant dropped out of high school at age seventeen to marry but left the abusive relationship fourteen years later, after bearing three daughters, and in 1976 met Denise Dorsz, the woman who was to become her long-term partner. She began writing at age forty after locking eyes with an eagle that swooped down in front of her car and transmitted a message to her, and since then has produced poetry, short stories, and personal and critical essays, published in three books and in numerous magazines and anthologies. In 1984 she edited a groundbreaking collection of North American Indian women's writing and art, A Gathering of Spirit, published first as a special double issue of the feminist magazine Sinister Wisdom and later in book form. "Native Origin" is from her book of poetry, short stories, and essays entitled Mohawk Trail (1985). NATIVE ORIGIN The old women are gathered in the Longhouse. First, the ritual kissing on the cheeks, the eyes, the lips, the top of the head; that spot where the hair parts in the middle like a wild river through a canyon. On either side, white hair flows unchecked, unbinded. One Grandmother sets the pot over the fire that has never gone out. To let the flames die is a taboo, a breaking of trust. The acorn shells have been roasted the night before. Grandmother pours the boiling water over the shells. An aroma rises and combines with the smell of wood smoke, sweat, and the sharp, sweet odor of blood. The acorn coffee steeps and grows dark and strong. The old women sit patiently in a circle, not speaking. Each set of eyes stares sharply into the air, or into the fire. Occasionally, a sigh escapes from an open mouth. A Grandmother has a twitch in the corner of her eye. She rubs her nose, then smooths her hair. The coffee is ready. Cups are brought out of a wooden cupboard. Each woman is given the steaming brew. They blow on the swirling liquid, then slurp the drink into their hungry mouths. It tastes good. Hot, strong, dark. A little bitter, but that is all to the good. The women begin talking among themselves. They are together to perform a ceremony. Rituals of women take time. There is no hurry. The magic things are brought out from pockets and pouches. A turtle rattle made from a she-turtle who was a companion of the woman's mother. It died the night she died, both of them ancient and tough. Now, the daughter shakes the rattle, and mother and she-turtle live again. Another Grandmother pulls out a bundle that contains a feather from a hermit thrush. This is a holy feather. Of all the birds in the sky, hermit thrush is the only one who flew to the Spirit World. It was there she learned her beautiful song. She is clever and hides from sight. To have her feather is great magic. The women pass around the feather. They tickle each other's chins and ears. Giggles and laughs erupt in the dwelling. From that same bundle of the hermit thrush, come kernels of corn, yellow, red, black. They rest in her wrinkled, dry palm. These are also passed around. Each woman holds the corn in her hand for a while before giving it to her sister. Next come the leaves of Witch Hazel and Jewelweed. Dandelion roots for chewing, Pearly Everlasting for smoking. These things are given careful consideration, and much talk is generated over the old ways of preparing the concoctions. A woman gives a smile and brings out a cradleboard from behind her back. There is nodding of heads and smiling and long drawn-out ahhhhs. The cradleboard has a beaded back that a mother made in her ninth month. An old woman starts a song; the rest join in: Little baby A Grandmother wipes her eyes, another holds her hands and kisses the lifelines. Inside the cradleboard are bunches of moss taken from a menstrual house. This moss has staunched rivers of blood that generations of young girls have squeezed from their wombs. The acorn drink is reheated and passed around again. A woman adds wood to the fire. She holds her hands out to the flames. It takes a lot of heat to warm her creaky body. Another woman comes behind her with a warm blanket. She wraps it around her friend and hugs her shoulders. They stand quietly before the fire. A pelt of fur is brought forth. It once belonged to a beaver. She was found one morning, frozen in the ice, her lodge unfinished. The beaver was thawed and skinned. The women worked the hide until it was soft and pliant. It was the right size to wrap a newborn baby in, or to comfort old women on cold nights. A piece of flint, an eagle bone whistle, a hank of black hair, cut in mourning; these are examined with reverent vibrations. The oldest Grandmother removes her pouch from around her neck. She opens it with rusty fingers. She spreads the contents in her lap. A fistful of black earth. It smells clean, fecund. The women inhale the odor, the metallic taste of iron is on their tongues, like sting. The oldest Grandmother scoops the earth back into her pouch. She tugs at the strings, it closes. The pouch lies between her breasts, warming her skin. Her breasts are supple and soft for one so old. Not long ago, she nursed a sister back to health. A child drank from her breast and was healed of evil spirits that entered her while she lay innocent and dreaming. The ceremony is over. The magic things are put in their places. The old women kiss and touch each other's faces. They go out in the night. The moon and stars are parts of the body of Sky Woman. She glows on, never dimming. Never receding. The Grandmothers go inside the Longhouse. They tend the fire, and wait. In a prodigious literary output that has mainly alternated novels with volumes of poetry, Marge Piercy (born 1936) confronts the important political issues of our time, making strong statements for civil rights, peace, economic justice, feminism, and care for the environment. Born to working-class parents in Detroit during the Depression, Piercy developed a political consciousness at an early age and was taught to love natural beauty by her Jewish mother, who always kept a garden. The first member of her family to go to college, she earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.A. from Northwestern University and began publishing poems in the 1960s, during her involvement with the antiwar and civil rights movements as a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The misogyny of other activists led her to join the growing women's movement, and feminist as well as ecological themes began to appear in her work. Since her move from Brooklyn to Cape Cod in 1971, when she began gardening, Piercy has "developed a sense of herself as part of the landscape and part of the web of living beings," according to one biographer. The anger and intensity characteristic of her novels, which typically have memorable heroines, shows up in some of her poetry as well, but many poems in collections such as Stone, Paper, Knife (1983), in which "The Common Living Dirt" first appeared, honor the earth's fecundity and celebrate nature's simple pleasures. Piercy lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, with her third husband, Ira Wood, with whom she has written a play, a novel, and a book on the craft of writing, and founded Leapfrog Press, a small literary publishing company. She is known as the "cat lady" of her town, as described in her memoir, Sleeping with Cats (2001). THE COMMON LIVING DIRT The small ears
prick on the bushes, The soil stretches
naked. All winter As I kneel to put
the seeds in You can live
thousands of years Yet you grow
exhausted with bearing We have lost the
simplest gratitude. Tending a plot of
your flesh binds I worship on my
knees, laying gone wild in grass
and flower power warps
because it involves joy Because you can
die of overwork, because The work of award-winning author Linda Hogan (born 1947) is informed, she says, by "the native tradition of respect for other species, for the land, and for the water," In poems, short stories, novels, essays, and memoir, she has sought to communicate an ecologically sound view of the world based on the traditions with which she was raised, as the daughter of a Chickasaw father and a white mother. Although Hogan was born in Denver, her tribal homeland is Oklahoma, and because her father was in the army, the family lived in a variety of places including Germany. She started writing poetry in her late twenties, after graduating from the University of Colorado, and had published five books of poetry and a short-story collection before her first novel, Mean Spirit, came out in 1990. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, it brings together tribal concerns and environmental issues, as do her later novels Solar Storms (1995) and Power (1998). Hogan spent eight years working as a volunteer in wildlife rehabilitation, seeing it as a way to begin healing "the severed trust we humans hold with earth." She collaborated with her friend and sister spirit Brenda Peterson on anthologies of women's writing about animals, plants, and God, and on a book about the gray whale. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (1995), from which the following is reprinted, is Hogan's first book of essays. She is the mother of two adopted daughters and lives in Colorado. WHAT HOLDS THE WATER, WHAT HOLDS THE LIGHT Walking up the damp hill in the hot sun, there were signs of the recent heavy rains. The land smelled fresh, shaded plants still held moisture in their green clustered leaves, and fresh deer tracks pointed uphill like arrows in the dark, moist soil. Along our way, my friend and I stopped at a cluster of large boulders to drink fresh rain collected in a hollow bowl that had been worn into stone over slow centuries. Bending over the stone, smelling earth up close, we drank sky off the surface of water. Mosses and ancient lichens lived there. And swimming in another stone cup were slender orange newts, alive and vibrant with the rains. Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts, and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered. One time, visiting friends, I found they had placed a Mexican water jar on the sink and filled it for me. It was a thin clay that smelled of dank earth, the unfired and unshaped land it had once been. In it was rain come from dark sky. A cool breeze lived inside the container, the way wind blows from a well that is held in the cupped hands of earth, fed with underground springs and rivers. The jar was made in Mexico City, once called Iztapalapa, the place where Montezuma lived during the time Cortes and his Spanish soldiers were colonizing the indigenous people and the land. Writer Barry Lopez has written about the aviaries of Iztapalapa that were burned by the Spanish, fires that burned the green hummingbirds and nesting blue herons, burned even the sound of wings and the white songs of egrets. It was not only the birds that died in those fires, but also the people and their records, the stories of human lives. De Soto also had this disregard for life. He once captured an indigenous woman because she carried a large pearl. His intention was, when they were far from her homeland, to kill the woman and steal the pearl, but one morning along their journey she managed to escape. De Soto's anger was enormous. It was as if the woman had taken something from him, and that fierce anger resulted in the killing of people and a relentless, ongoing war against land. Humans colonizing and conquering others have a propensity for this, for burning behind them what they cannot possess or control, as if their conflicts are not with themselves and their own way of being, but with the land itself. In the 1930s, looters found the Spiro burial mounds of Oklahoma and sold to collectors artifacts that they removed from the dead. When caught and forbidden to continue their thefts, the men dynamited two of the mounds the way a wolverine sprays food so that nothing else will take possession of it. It seems, looking back, that these invasions amounted to a hatred of life itself, of fertility and generation. The conquerors and looters refused to participate in a reciprocal and balanced exchange with life. They were unable to receive the best gifts of land, not gold or pearls or ownership, but a welcome acceptance of what is offered. They did not understand that the earth is generous and that encounters with the land might have been sustaining, or that their meetings with other humans could have led to an enriched confluence of ways. But here is a smaller event, one we are more likely to witness as a daily, common occurrence. Last year, I was at the Colorado River with a friend when two men from the Department of Fish and Wildlife came to stock the water with rainbow trout. We wanted to watch the silver-sided fish find their way to freedom in the water, so we stood quietly by as the men climbed into the truck bed and opened the tank that held fish. To our dismay, the men did not use the nets they carried with them to unload the fish. Instead they poured the fish into the bed of their truck, kicked them out and down the hill, and then into water. The fish that survived were motionless, shocked, gill slits barely moving, skin hanging off the wounds. At most, it would have taken only a few minutes longer for the men to have removed the fish carefully with their nets, to have treated the lives they handled with dignity and respect, with caretakers' hands. These actions, all of them, must be what Bushman people mean when they say a person is far-hearted. This far-hearted kind of thinking is one we are especially prone to now, with our lives moving so quickly ahead, and it is one that sees life, other lives, as containers for our own uses and not as containers in a greater, holier sense. Even wilderness is seen as having value only as it enhances and serves our human lives, our human world. While most of us agree that wilderness is necessary to our spiritual and psychological well-being, it is a container of far more, of mystery, of a life apart from ours. It is not only where we go to escape who we have become and what we have done, but it is also part of the natural laws, the workings of a world of beauty and depth we do not yet understand. It is something beyond us, something that does not need our hand in it. As one of our Indian elders has said, there are laws beyond our human laws, and ways above ours. We have no words for this in our language, or even for our experience of being there. Ours is a language of commerce and trade, of laws that can be bent in order that treaties might be broken, land wounded beyond healing. It is a language that is limited, emotionally and spiritually, as if it can't accommodate such magical strength and power. The ears of this language do not often hear the songs of the white egrets, the rain falling into stone bowls. So we make our own songs to contain these things, make ceremonies and poems, searching for a new way to speak, to say we want a new way to live in the world, to say that wilderness and water, blue herons and orange newts are invaluable not just to us, but in themselves, in the workings of the natural world that rules us whether we acknowledge it or not. That clay water jar my friends filled with water might have been made of the same earth that housed the birds of Iztapalapa. It might have contained water the stunned trout once lived in. It was not only a bridge between the elements of earth, air, water, and fire but was also a bridge between people, a reservoir of love and friendship, the kind of care we need to offer back every day to the world as we begin to learn the land and its creatures, to know the world is the container for our lives, sometimes wild and untouched, sometimes moved by a caretaker's hands. Until we learn this, and learn our place at the bountiful table, how to be a guest here, this land will not support us, will not be hospitable, will turn on us. That water jar was a reminder of how water and earth love each other the way they do, meeting at night, at the shore, being friends together, dissolving in each other, in the give and take that is where grace comes from. Essayist Kathleen Dean Moore brings the mind of a philosopher, the sensibility of a naturalist, and her life experience as a mother, daughter, and wife to the challenge of finding new ways to understand our connection with the natural world. Of particular interest to her are the ties that bind us to family and place in an increasingly restless world. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father was a park naturalist and biology professor, she earned a B.A. from the College of Wooster in Ohio and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Colorado. Formerly chair of the Department of Philosophy at Oregon State University, she now directs the philosophy department's Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. Moore seeks to "bring philosophy to life" in essays published in a wide range of journals and magazines, and has written two award-winning volumes of nature essays -- Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water (1995) and Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World (1999). She describes herself and her family (her husband, Frank Moore, teaches biology at OSU, and they have a grown son and daughter) as "wild for anything wet -- big rivers, small boats, desert canyons, and the edges of the sea." The following essay about releasing the power of rivers to heal themselves appeared originally in Audubon magazine (March/April 2001). AMAZING GRACE Three miles downstream from the covered bridge on the Marys River, there used to be a dam. The Marys is a small river west of the Cascade Mountains, barely a creek by Oregon standards. It was not much of a dam either, just a three-foot-high concrete wall built by a farmer to power a paddle wheel for his private electrical plant. By the time my husband, Frank, and I bought the land on both sides of the river, the farmer had moved on, the pastures had grown up to Queen Anne's lace and bracken, and the paddle-wheel blades had rusted off and washed downriver; but the dam remained. We decided to blow it up. Even though it was insignificant as dams go, we worried that our dam made life hard for Willamette River cutthroat trout. In late winter, when the water is still high, the cutthroats migrate from the Willamette into the feeder streams of the Marys River watershed to spawn. But when the Marys starts to warm up in late spring, and water levels drop, many of them head downstream again to spend summer in the deeper river. Our dam blocked the Marys at low flow, forcing the fish to hang out in slackwater, waiting for rain. The dam blocked canoeists, too, who had to portage through a wicked blackberry bramble or jump out of their boat, haul it across the dam, and climb in again -- a tricky maneuver. Taking out a dam wasn't a political issue in 1990, and it never occurred to us that it might be a legal issue or a decision controlled by layered federal agencies. Somebody put a dam in; somebody could take it out. As Frank and I talked it over, we made no fine distinctions among blowing up, taking out, breaching, and notching. We just wanted to get the dam out of the way, and dynamite was good enough. We hired a guy recommended by somebody who knew somebody from work. A fist of concrete in the center of the road was the first sign of trouble when we drove from home to the farm the day after the dam came out. Even before the river came into view, we could see rocks littering the roof of the neighbors' barn, and when we climbed through blackberries to the creek, we found rubble scattered bank to bank. Twisted rebar stuck out of the river, each post catching a little V of twigs and dried leaves. The guy must have drilled some holes, stuck in some dynamite, lit a fuse, and run like hell. We apologized repeatedly to the neighbors, but they were just grateful that by some blind miracle we hadn't brained their cow. Wading into the river, we started sawing out the rebar with the neighbors' hacksaw. It was a wet business, leaning over at the waist, up to our armpits in silty water, sawing away. The river was so muddy that we stumbled around, feeling with our feet for rubble, stopping sometimes to wiggle our tennis shoes loose from the silt. All afternoon we hauled blocks of concrete out of the riverbed, stacking them as artfully as we could along the edge. Every time I stood to stretch my back, I heard restless water and felt the awakening river push against my legs. As hard as we worked to clean the bed of the little reservoir, the river worked harder, lifting clouds of silt from the gravel and swirling them toward a beach at the bend downriver. By the end of the day, what had been slackwater was a stream again. Exhausted, we sat on the roots of a willow tree and watched the river, washed silver by a watery sun emerging between clouds and hills. I wish I could say there were trout leaping in rainbow arcs over the river. I wish I could say there were trumpets. There were not. But from every rush and backwash, each swell of water over rock, each small spurt and riffle, each surge, all the slosh and spill of a river on the move, came a music we had never heard in that place. Now, 10 years after the great demolishment, what was a silty slackwater river bottom is scrubbed to bedrock, and moss and iris crowd the rocky edge. The river runs strong across a riffle, hesitates, then dives in a smooth swell over the sill where the dam used to be. The Marys still has its problems-- agricultural runoff from pastures upstream, clear-cutting on the highest hills. But cutthroat trout breed freely in the little streams upriver, and on a good day the water runs clear under the roots of the willows. And now, all across the country, people are taking out dams and restoring free-flowing rivers. Kennebec, Naugatuck, Chipola, Bear, Walla Walla, Whitestone, Souadabscook -- almost 500 dams from California to Maine. In the Pacific Northwest, my corner of the continent, everybody's talking about the dams in the Columbia Basin. Maybe engineers will draw down the reservoir behind the John Day Dam on the Columbia River, uncovering miles of cobble riverbed that might someday be full again of salmons' arching backs and flashing tails and streamers of bright red eggs. Or maybe engineers will breach the four dams on the lower Snake River, and when the reservoirs have drained away and floods have scoured the river, find spawning beds and smooth rock walls where there was only mud. Then the salmon could return -- thousands of salmon, millions of salmon, silver shapes leaping up the whole lively length of the Columbia River. The excitement comes not only from activists and fisheries, biologists and politicians but from friends and families and our neighbors in the little town we live in. The idea captures people, raises their pulse. It's wild, hopeful talk. "Maybe it's not too late," says the man down the street. "It could happen. In my lifetime. Imagine." He smiles a long smile and folds his hands behind his neck. *** Last week I drove out of the wet valleys of western Oregon and turned east along the length of the stair-stepped reservoirs that Northwesterners still affectionately call the Columbia River. On the east side of the Cascade Mountains, this is scab-land, a steppe of sage and bunchgrass prairies, layer on layer of basalt laid down by lava flows and shaped by floods into brown velvet hills, greening in the creases on this spring day, capped with fraying clouds and scalloped with rimrock and high-tension wires from hydroelectric plants. Drifts of purple lupine were just beginning to flower. At the place where the river once turned on edge and thundered between basalt cliffs, where native people stood on platforms and hauled salmon from the maelstrom with long-handled nets, where in March 1957 the floodgates of the Dalles Dam closed and a reservoir drowned the river overnight, I stood on the lawn by the water and tossed pieces of my McBreakfast to a gull. The noise was deafening -- roaring trucks on the highway, bells at the railroad crossing, and then the rapid pulse of an empty train. The river itself was silent. I have come to believe that dam-breaching is not really about dams. It's probably not even about fish. Dam-breaching is America's own exercise in truth and reconciliation. For a hundred years we thought we could have it all -- cheap power, salmon, and alfalfa fields in the desert -- but we were wrong. We thought we could capture the great rivers in the West, put them to narrow human purposes, and pay no price. Wrong again. We thought it made perfectly good sense to transport salmon in trucks on the highway, so that grain and petroleum could move in barges on the river. We thought we needed power and wealth, but we discovered to our sorrow that what we really need are health and beauty and a way of life that listens to the land. In the Columbia Basin, once home to 10 million wild salmon, endemic Snake River coho salmon are extinct. Snake River chinook are threatened. Sockeyes are endangered. What humans destroy, we often destroy forever. When lumbermen cut an ancient forest, another like it will not grow in my lifetime, or my grandchildren's, not in 15 generations. When the last member of a species dies in a zoo, it is gone forever. But a river? A river has the power to forgive. To breach a dam is to admit mistakes, and so to release the power of the river to heal itself, to begin to heal the rift between human and nature, user and used. Sitting in my car behind a chain-link fence that separates the highway from the river, I can imagine people lined up at the edge of the Columbia, watching as water drains through the John Day Dam and the riverbed rises slowly into that blue desert air. Water pours from every crease, and smooth basalt slabs appear, gray and mammoth. People will pull into the highway overlooks, stand in small groups under cottonwoods in the riverside parks, wade across the mud to pile stone cairns at the falling edge of water -- crowds of people, gathering quietly to witness the rebirth of a river. In the first days, all they will hear is a whisper, the movement of silt in warm water. But as the lake falls away and a rocky island splits the channel, the river will shout over rapids and then begin to roar, a full-throated roar lifting the screams of gulls and the laughter of children who jump from rock to rock, leaving their footprints in soft sand beside the prints of geese, scooping minnows from pools of water stranded inside rotting tires. Maybe the people will cheer. Maybe they will pray. Maybe they will weep when they see the pale riverbed, drowned for a very long time. But the first rain will clean the highest rocks, the first flood will cut a channel through the silt. Storksbill and balsamroot will poke up between slabs of mud drying on new riverbanks, and I know from experience that there will come a time -- maybe a very long time, but in our lifetimes if we live right -- when the roots of willows will reach into clear water again. Nancy Newhall (1908-1974) was the first curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art and wrote incisively about the inner lives of prominent photographers, but she also collaborated with Ansel Adams to produce what Justice William O. Douglas called "one of the great statements in the history of conservation." This Is the American Earth (1960) began as a photographic exhibit meant to reside in the Sierra Club's LeConte Lodge in Yosemite National Park and to explain what national parks were all about. When Ansel Adams asked Nancy Newhall to assist him in the exhibit, she did extensive reading to understand the history of the conservation idea and in the process developed a deep concern for the earth. Her eloquent free verse accompanied photos by Adams and others when the exhibit opened at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco in May 1955. The exhibit was eventually circulated throughout the United States by the Smithsonian Institution and throughout the world by the United States Information Service before it was turned into a book. Newhall was born and raised in New England, educated at Smith College, and married the eminent photohistorian Beaumont Newhall. In her distinguished career as curator, critic, editor, designer, and historian, she was most comfortable working in the background while drawing attention to the creations and ideas of others. About This Is the American Earth, she wrote to Adams, "I think our job is to prepare the way for a new faith and a new world. " The following is an excerpt from the fifth of six chapters in the book, entitled "Dynamics." DYNAMICS Shall we not learn
from life its laws, dynamics, balances? DOROTHY RICHARDS WITH HOPE SAWYER BUYUKMIHCI Dorothy Richards (1894-1985) and Hope Sawyer Buyukmihci (1913-2001) both spent much of their lives leading efforts to protect the beaver, the keystone species of North America's wetlands. Both grew up in once beaver-rich New York after the creature had been trapped nearly to extinction, and both bought acreage with their husbands that became wildlife sanctuaries. Richards's fifty years of devotion to beavers began the day a pair were delivered as part of a state conservation program to the farm outside Dolgeville, New York, that she and her husband, Al, had recently purchased. The beavers captured her interest and then her heart, and she and Al eventually acquired surrounding land and established Beaversprite Sanctuary while supporting themselves by running a small stationery supply business. Buyukmihci ("byew-yewk-mucha") worked as an illustrator on natural history publications at Cornell University before she and her Turkish husband, Cavit, moved in 1961 to a modest home on the banks of a beaver pond in the New Jersey Pine Barrens near Newfield. They continued to acquire acreage and in 1968 incorporated the Unexpected Wildlife Refuge, whose story is told in her books Unexpected Treasure (1968) and Hour of the Beaver (1971). In 1970 she founded Beaver Defenders, and subsequently coauthored Richards's story, Beaversprite: My Years Building an Animal Sanctuary (1977). Today the two sanctuaries continue to exist, the Friends of Beaversprite that formed upon Richards's death has become Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife (www.beaversww.org) and subsumed the membership of Beaver Defenders, and the three Buyukmihci children are active in animal rights work. Beaversprite, the final chapter of which is reprinted here, is finally a lesson in ecological thinking, both a model and an eloquent plea for change in human-animal relationships. END OF THE BEGINNING Spring is wonderful here in the foothills of the Adirondacks. There is a special vigor in the air that I have found nowhere else. The birds return and the shadbush brightens the woods. If it were not for one persistent sadness Beaversprite would be heaven. A beaver trapping season is opened each year, and as soon as it is over I have to say goodbye to those who have been with me for two years. Those in the wild also will leave home and I will never see them again. I have tried hard not to make pets of the captive beavers, never handling them nor allowing anyone else to do so. If they could stay within the boundaries of the sanctuary they might have a chance to live normal and long lives. But their avoidance of incest makes them go in search of mates and of distant locations in which to establish homes. As I write, the current trapping season is still open, and ads in local papers offer thirty-four dollars for a beaver pelt, for the life of a beautiful intelligent creature who benefits the world and could teach human beings a great deal about gentleness, thrift, and morals in general. Beavers' enemies now consist almost entirely of two species -- man and dogs. They are in more danger than ever before, for though the number of species preying on them has decreased, the force and numbers of the two species left has become overwhelming. Only now, after half a lifetime of observation, do I feel confident of what I have learned about beavers, and keenly aware of how much there is yet to be learned. Having no scientific training I have had to rely on common sense and perception and faithful daily observation. These have led me to disagree with those who believe that the intelligence of animals is proportional to the size of the brain, and to distrust much else of what I have read. The new science of ethology --"scientific study of animal behavior and formation of characteristics -- -offers hope for the future. But only if it is pursued with love for the subjects of study. There can be no understanding without love. Each person born into this world has a right to everything he needs. His right, however, is bound up with that of every other creature and gives him no license to grab everything he can without allowing a share for others. Beavers give more than they take. They are an asset no matter where they live. Somehow we must make room for them, and come to appreciate them as a lively, integral part of wild beauty -- as keepers of the streams, for which role they were born. To accommodate ourselves to beavers and a variety of other creatures, we must learn to think small in the realm of human population. Even before Beaversprite was created I could see that the human population needed to be curbed. The mandate, "Be fruitful and replenish the earth," had changed to an ominous, "Be fruitful and destroy the earth." Our species had taken to ravishing the land to feed billions of people and poisoning the earth and the animals to make room for overcrowded humans and their insatiable desires. Al and I, much as we loved children -- in fact, because we loved them -- decided early not to add to the burden. After becoming addicted to beavers for a few months I began to read the works of great naturalists and humanists such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Albert Schweitzer, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Konrad Lorenz. Their philosophy never contradicted what I saw around me, but added insight and inspiration. Meanwhile the beavers welcomed me into their lives, invited me to swim with them, and actually showed patience while I slowly realized the meaning of their actions. I am convinced that biology should be taught as a course in human-animal relationships -- not as a study of dead bodies or caged victims. Reams of paper have been wasted on the natural history of beavers, and their population statistics and commercial value. But it is the individual beaver, trying to make a living while beset with natural hazards that keep him inventive and strong, who deserves our study. To know fellow creatures we must establish mutual trust, communication, and empathy. That's what children need to learn. We need to appeal to their natural love for animals and their sense of fair play, not to selfish or materialistic motives. What we need most is positive humane education that will overcome negative attitudes long established. The youth who sets traps does not realize the agony he causes. The people who wear fur on their clothing are not aware of their crime. Those who "manage" wildlife have allowed themselves to be blindfolded. Humane education can show youth that animals have feelings and rights like their own, fashion-conscious people that wearing of fur is a barbaric hangover, and well-meaning wildlife managers that they, like the animals, are victims of monied interests. My heart goes out to children. Unless their minds have already been warped by adults, they love animals and want to share life with them. It is not their fault that they have been deprived of friendly contact with wildlife in all its bewitching variety. Mere curiosity motivates many of the visitors to our sanctuary, but those with open minds expand visibly as they watch the beavers' actions. Although timid at first when finding themselves surrounded by these humped, ambulating creatures whose teeth, so they've heard, can take your arm off, most of our guests soon express surprised delight. "How could anybody hurt one of those animals!" they say, when a beaver kit lifts his small hands in an appealing gesture. I am pretty sure those who visit Beaversprite will never be tempted to wear beaver fur. (Once a woman did ask, though, how many of "those things" it took to make a fur coat.) One neighbor was a frequent visitor when she first came to our vicinity. She had bought a place on another road for the purpose of enjoying exclusive hunting rights. For her a few contacts with the beavers was enough. "To me animals have always been moving targets and I took pride in a good shot,'' she declared. "You've spoiled it for me -- they don't look like targets anymore. Now I'm spoiling it for everyone else. Already I've converted a few of my friends. And God pity the man I find on my land with a gun!" Letters come to me, and most of them express appreciation of my work and sympathy with the beavers. One man wrote, "I like beavers, too, but they should be left alone in the wild." I agree with him. This is my aim, too, and thousands of visitors over the years have left my house with at least a little knowledge of beavers and their important place in the ecosystem. I make sure to tell them that floods are prevented wherever beavers are allowed to inhabit the headwaters of streams. Also that beaver ponds conserve water by forcing it to seep into the surrounding land rather than running off in torrents, thereby benefiting the land in times of drought. Most of all I make them aware of the abundance of fish, birds, and other animals who profit by a source of water in which to drink, swim, live, feed -- or do all four. Visitors see this for themselves as they look from my windows to a beaver dam only a hundred feet away. Once I got a letter from a professional trapper, who offered me money if I would divulge beaver secrets that would help him ply his grisly trade. His request made me ponder. Was I forging a two-edged sword that would be turned against the beavers? The thought of children, who should not be deprived of beaver knowledge as I had been, set me straight. I would trust a new generation to put my information to good use. As for making our free beavers more vulnerable by befriending them, I knew that they had as much chance as completely wild ones -- and as little -- of escaping traps set at hidden entrances, or on dams they must maintain in order to survive. To me protecting wildlife is the most worthwhile cause on earth, because it is a fundamental good as well as a personally rewarding experience. Since the whole human race is dependent on the balance of nature and our neglect and abuse can go only so far before we cause a fatal debacle, what else is as worthwhile? If man does not reverse the trend of overpopulation, destroying and upsetting the balance of nature, interdependent species will become extinct one by one, and man himself will perish -- the victim of his own reckless way of life.... People ask me, "What about the future of Beaversprite? What will happen to your beavers and to the land?" My friend Adam had one answer. As he lay dying his last words were, "When you're gone, Dot, there won't be any more beavers here. They'll go, too." I don't believe that. My work has been only a beginning. Young hands are growing up and taking hold and they'll go on when I leave. I hope that the rolling, wooded acres of Beaversprite will always be a sanctuary, that they will never be cut up into building lots, and that hunting and trapping will never be allowed. I trust that some dedicated person will continue to study beavers here for a long time to come -- until the day when beavers are protected in the wild and anyone who wishes may find a colony where he may sit down, call his beaver friends to him, and commune with them. Acquisition of land has meant nothing to me except a reaching out of arms to protect more wild animals, at a time when ownership of land is the only way to save them. Our sanctuary consists of old farms along winding country roads. Giant sugar maples arch across and cast shade over mossy stone walls, along which chipmunks scamper. On hills around the five beaver ponds of the resident colony grow a riot of evergreens and deciduous trees, sprung up to reforest pasture and cropland long since given over by man. Along the edges of ponds and streams willow, alder, and a variety of aquatic plants flourish which nourish the beavers. Every part of the sanctuary has its special beauty, enhanced by the songs of the Littlesprite and Middlesprite as they make their way through leafy haunts to join the Bigsprite and East Canada Creek. These in turn blend with the Mohawk River on its way to the mighty Hudson. Listening to these infant streams, born as springs or melt water in the Adirondacks above, I envision their entire course inhabited by and cared for by generations of beavers in a world where people unafraid of emotion will share life with fellow animals. My dream is not an impossible one. Man can fit himself in. Like a beaver, he can build the structure of a new life. One stick at a time, he can stem the flood of materialism that is threatening to sweep him off the face of the earth. When he goes back to a simple life in harmony with nature he will find a happiness no other generation has known. Joan McIntyre (born 1931) grew up in California and in the early seventies founded the first organization to focus attention on the plight of the whales, Project Jonah. She edited a best-selling collection of writings on whales and dolphins entitled Mind in the Waters (1974), suggesting that these creatures have consciousness and that we might begin to heal our alienation and spiritual loneliness by learning to respect and care for them as the teachers they are. Her words from Mind in the Waters that follow are just as stirring today as they were then, and even more necessary. After years as director of Project Jonah, McIntyre left the pressures of her activist life and moved to the Hawaiian island of Lanai, feeling a need to return to the sea and to ask this "great mother of us all" to cleanse her of the anger, weariness, and confusion that her activism had left her with. In her graceful and wise book about this period of her life, The Delicate Art of Whale Watching (1982), she suggests that anyone who seeks to approach nature and its creatures should "go light and free, with as little as you can manage, with as open a mind and heart as you can carry." She subsequently visited Fiji on a two-week vacation and ended up marrying a native, Male Varawa (making her Joan McIntyre Varawa), as she describes in Changes in Latitude: An Uncommon Anthropology (1989). MIND IN THE WATERS There was a time in our culture, not long ago, when the essential role of men and women was to nurture and protect each other, to be the caretakers of life and earth. At that time, when the sun sparkled on the sea of our imagination as freshly as it sparkled on the sea herself, we thought of our world and each other in ways which were life-venerating and death-respecting. The porpoise school that weaves its history protectively around its common existence, the whales that tune body and mind in a continuous awareness of life, are not symbols of an alien mythology -- they are evocative of what was once the core of human relationships. Animals were once, for all of us, teachers. They instructed us in ways of being and perceiving that extended our imaginations, that were models for additional possibilities. We watched them make their way through the intricacies of their lives with wonder and with awe. Seeing the wolf pick his delicate way across the snowy forest floor, the eyes of the owl hold the image of the mouse, the dark shape of the whale break the surface of the sea -- reminded us of the grand sweep and diversity of life, of its infinite possibilities. The connection of humans with totemic animals was an essential need to ally ourselves with the power and intelligence of non-human life, to absorb some of the qualities bestowed by the evolutionary process on other creatures. Whales and dolphins -- all Cetaceans-- are intensely interesting to us now. They seem to speak for a form of consciousness we are beginning to re-explore in our own inner natures. They help us chart our interior wilderness. We can hear whales singing. If we pay attention and let them live, perhaps we will hear them speak, in their own accents, their own language. It would be an extravagant reward to experience, by empathy, a different band of reality. We are animals of the land. They are animals of the oceans. We have hands to move and mold the things of the earth. They do not. But with an intelligence imagined as grand as ours -- what do they do? What can they do, with mind imprisoned in all that flesh and no fingers for releasing it? I have stroked, and swum with, and looked at these creatures, and felt their essence rise to meet me like perfume on a spring day. Touched by it, I felt gentler myself, more open to the possibilities that existed around me. There may be only one way to begin to learn from them -- and that is to begin. We would not be harmed by returning to the roots which once nourished us, which still, unseen, link together all life that lives, and feels, and thinks, and dies, on this, our common planet. Ursula K. Le Guin (born 1929) has often incorporated ecological themes in a large body of award-winning work that includes novels, short stories, essays, poetry, criticism, and children's books. Having inherited a fascination with anthropology from her parents, anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and writer-folklorist Theodora Kroeber, she particularly enjoys inventing cultures as a way to suggest new possibilities for human society and personality. Born in Berkeley, California, she earned a B.A. in French from Radcliffe and an M.A. in romance languages from Columbia University. She married a historian whom she met while in Paris studying on a Fulbright scholarship and the couple settled in Portland and raised three children. Le Guin sent out stories for ten years with no success before she found a place in the science fiction market, and then went on to win numerous awards, including Hugo and Nebula awards, a National Book Award, and a Newbery Silver Medal. Starting with Always Coming Home (1985), a novel set in the Napa Valley of California in the distant future that imagines a society living in harmony with the land, Le Guin began to explore the power of writing like a woman. For her, this has meant writing from the viewpoint of one who values a sense of community with all life and who, with animals and children, has been devalued in a male-defined hierarchy. She explains that she wrote "May's Lion," reprinted here from Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (1987), as a warm-up exercise for Always Coming Home. In the story, she tries to imagine how a familiar scene might play itself out differently in a culture more respectful of and receptive toward earth's creatures and the mythic meanings we might invest them with. MAY'S LION Jim remembers it as a bobcat, and he was May's nephew, and ought to know. It probably was a bobcat. I don't think May would have changed her story, though you can't trust a good story-teller not to make the story suit herself, or get the facts to fit the story better. Anyhow she told it to us more than once, because my mother and I would ask for it; and the way I remember it, it was a mountain lion. And the way I remember May telling it is sitting on the edge of the irrigation tank we used to swim in, cement rough as a lava flow and hot in the sun, the long cracks tarred over. She was an old lady then with a long Irish upper lip, kind and wary and balky. She liked to come sit and talk with my mother while I swam; she didn't have all that many people to talk to. She always had chickens, in the chickenhouse very near the back door of the farmhouse, so the whole place smelled pretty strong of chickens, and as long as she could she kept a cow or two down in the old barn by the creek. The first of May's cows I remember was Pearl, a big handsome Holstein who gave fourteen or twenty-four or forty gallons or quarts of milk at a milking, whichever is right for a prize milker. Pearl was beautiful in my eyes when I was four or five years old; I loved and admired her. I remember how excited I was, how I reached upward to them, when Pearl or the workhorse Prince, for whom my love amounted to worship, would put an immense and sensitive muzzle through the three- strand fence to whisk a cornhusk from my fearful hand; and then the munching and the sweet breath and the big nose would be at the barbed wire again: the offering is acceptable.... After Pearl there was Rosie, a purebred Jersey. May got her either cheap or free because she was a runt calf, so tiny that May brought her home on her lap in the back of the car, like a fawn. And Rosie always looked like she had some deer in her. She was a lovely, clever little cow and even more willful than old May. She often chose not to come in to be milked. We would hear May calling and then see her trudging across our lower pasture with the bucket, going to find Rosie wherever Rosie had decided to be milked today on the wild hills she had to roam in, a hundred acres of our and Old Jim's land. Then May had a fox terrier named Pinky, who yipped and nipped and turned me against fox terriers for life, but he was long gone when the mountain lion came; and the black cats who lived in the barn kept discreetly out of the story. As a matter of fact now I think of it the chickens weren't in it either. It might have been quite different if they had been. May had quit keeping chickens after old Mrs. Walter died. It was just her alone there, and Rosie and the cats down in the barn, and nobody else within sight or sound of the old farm. We were in our house up the hill only in the summer, and Jim lived in town, those years. What time of year it was I don't know, but I imagine the grass still green or just turning gold. And May was in the house, in the kitchen, where she lived entirely unless she was asleep or outdoors, when she heard this noise. Now you need May herself, sitting skinny on the edge of the irrigation tank, seventy or eighty or ninety years old, nobody knew how old May was and she had made sure they couldn't find out, opening her pleated lips and letting out this noise -- a huge, awful yowl, starting soft with a nasal hum and rising slowly into a snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr.... It got better every time she told the story. "It was some meow," she said. So she went to the kitchen door, opened it, and looked out. Then she shut the kitchen door and went to the kitchen window to look out, because there was a mountain lion under the fig tree. Puma, cougar, catamount; Felis concolor, the shy, secret, shadowy lion of the New World, four or five feet long plus a yard of black-tipped tail, weighs about what a woman weighs, lives where the deer live from Canada to Chile, but always shyer, always fewer, the color of dry leaves, dry grass. There were plenty of deer in the Valley in the forties, but no mountain lion had been seen for decades anywhere near where people lived. Maybe way back up in the canyons; but Jim, who hunted, and knew every deer-trail in the hills, had never seen a lion. Nobody had, except May, now, alone in her kitchen. "I thought maybe it was sick," she told us. "It wasn't acting right. I don't think a lion would walk right into the yard like that if it was feeling well. If I'd still had the chickens it'd be a different story maybe! But it just walked around some, and then it lay down there," and she points between the fig tree and the decrepit garage. "And then after a while it kind of meowed again, and got up and come into the shade right there." The fig tree, planted when the house was built, about the time May was born, makes a great, green, sweet-smelling shade. "It just laid there looking around. It wasn't well," says May. She had lived with and looked after animals all her life; she had also earned her living for years as a nurse. "Well, I didn't know exactly what to do for it. So I put out same water for it. It didn't even get up when I come out the door. I put the water down there, not so close to it that we'd scare each other, see, and it kept watching me, but it didn't move. After I went back in it did get up and tried to drink some water. Then it made that kind of meowowow. I do believe it come here because it was looking for help. Or just for company, maybe." The afternoon went on, May in the kitchen, the lion under the fig tree. But down in the barnyard by the creek was Rosie the cow. Fortunately the gate was shut, so she could not come wandering up to the house and meet the lion; but she would be needing to be milked, come six or seven o'clock, and that got to worrying May. She also worried how long a sick mountain lion might hang around, keeping her shut in the house. May didn't like being shut in. "I went out a time or two, and went shoo!" Eyes shining amidst fine wrinkles, she flaps her thin arms at the lion. "Shoo! Go on home now!" But the silent wild creature watches her with yellow eyes and does not stir. "So when I was talking to Miss Macy on the telephone, she said it might have rabies, and I ought to call the sheriff. I was uneasy then. So finally I did that, and they come out, those county police, you know. Two carloads." Her voice is dry and quiet. "I guess there was nothing else they knew how to do. So they shot it." She looks off across the field Old Jim, her brother, used to plow with Prince the horse and irrigate with the water from this tank. Now wild oats and blackberry grow there. In another thirty years it will be a rich man's vineyard, a tax write-off. "He was seven feet long, all stretched out, before they took him off. And so thin! They all said, Well, Aunt May, I guess you were scared there! I guess you were some scared!' But I wasn't. I didn't want him shot. But I didn't know what to do for him. And I did need to get to Rosie." *** I have told this true story which May gave to us as truly as I could, and now I want to tell it as fiction, yet without taking it from her: rather to give it back to her, if I can do so. It is a tiny part of the history of the Valley, and I want to make it part of the Valley outside history. Now the field that the poor man plowed and the rich man harvested lies on the edge of a little town, houses and workshops of timber and fieldstone standing among almond, oak, and eucalyptus trees; and now May is an old woman with a name that means the month of May: Rains End. An old Woman with a long, wrinkled-pleated upper lip, she is living alone for the summer in her summer place, a meadow a mile or so up in the hills above the little town. Sinshan. She took her cow Rose with her, and since Rose tends to wander she keeps her on a long tether down by the tiny creek, and moves her into fresh grass now and then. The summerhouse is what they call a nine-pole house, a mere frame of poles stuck in the ground -- one of them is a live digger-pine sapling -- with stick and matting walls, and mat roof and floors. It doesn't rain in the dry season, and the roof is just for shade. But the house and its little front yard where Rains End has her camp stove and clay oven and matting loom are well shaded by a fig tree that was planted there a hundred years or so ago by her grandmother. Rains End herself has no grandchildren; she never bore a child, and her one or two marriages were brief and very long ago. She has a nephew and two grandnieces, and feels herself an aunt to all children, even when they are afraid of her and rude to her because she has got so ugly with old age, smelling as musty as a chickenhouse. She considers it natural for children to shrink away from somebody part way dead, and knows that when they're a little older and have got used to her they'll ask her for stories. She was for sixty years a member of the Doctors Lodge, and though she doesn't do curing any more people still ask her to help with nursing sick children, and the children come to long for the kind, authoritative touch of her hands when she bathes them to bring a fever down, or changes a dressing, or combs out bed-tangled hair with witch hazel and great patience. So Rains End was just waking up from an early afternoon nap in the heat of the day, under the matting roof, when she heard a noise, a huge, awful yowl that started soft with a nasal hum and rose slowly into a snarling gargle that sank away into a sobbing purr.... And she got up and looked out from the open side of the house of sticks and matting, and saw a mountain lion under the fig tree. She looked at him from her house; he looked at her from his. And this part of the story is much the same: the old woman; the lion; and, down by the creek, the cow. It was hot. Crickets sang shrill in the yellow grass on all the hills and canyons, in all the chaparral. Rains End filled a bowl with water from an unglazed jug and came slowly out of the house. Halfway between the house and the lion she set the bowl down on the dirt. She turned and went back to the house. The lion got up after a while and came and sniffed at the water. He lay down again with a soft, querulous groan, almost like a sick child, and looked at Rains End with the yellow eyes that saw her in a different way than she had ever been seen before. She sat on the matting in the shade of the open part of her house and did some mending. When she looked up at the lion she sang under her breath, tunelessly; she wanted to remember the Puma Dance Song but could only remember bits of it, so she made a song for the occasion: You are there,
lion. As the afternoon wore on she began to worry about going down to milk Rose. Unmilked, the cow would start tugging at her tether and making a commotion. That was likely to upset the lion. He lay so close to the house now that if she came out that too might upset him, and she did not want to frighten him or to become frightened of him. He had evidently come for some reason, and it behoved her to find out what the reason was. Probably he was sick; his coming so close to a human person was strange, and people who behave strangely are usually sick or in some kind of pain. Sometimes, though, they are spiritually moved to act strangely. The lion might be a messenger, or might have some message of his own for her or her townspeople. She was more used to seeing birds as messengers; the four-footed people go about their own business. But the lion, dweller in the Seventh House, comes from the place dreams come from. Maybe she did not understand. Maybe someone else would understand. She could go over and tell Valiant and her family, whose summerhouse was in Gahheya meadow, farther up the creek; or she could go over to Buck's, on Baldy Knoll. But there were four or five adolescents there, and one of them might come and shoot the lion, to boast that he'd saved old Rains End from getting clawed to bits and eaten. Mooooooo! said Rose, down by the creek, reproachfully. The sun was still above the southwest ridge, but the branches of pines were across it and the heavy heat was out of it, and shadows were welling up in the low fields of wild oats and blackberry. Moooooo! said Rose again, louder. The lion lifted up his square, heavy head, the color of dry wild oats, and gazed down across the pastures. Rains End knew from that weary movement that he was very ill. He had come for company in dying, that was all. "I'll come back, lion," Rains End sang tunelessly. "Lie still. Be quiet. I'll come back soon." Moving softly and easily, as she would move in a room with a sick child, she got her milking pail and stool, slung the stool on her back with a woven strap so as to leave a hand free, and came out of the house. The lion watched her at first very tense, the yellow eyes firing up for a moment, but then put his head down again with that little grudging, groaning sound. ''I'll come back, lion," Rains End said. She went down to the creekside and milked a nervous and indignant cow. Rose could smell lion, and demanded in several ways, all eloquent, just what Rains End intended to do? Rains End ignored her questions and sang milking songs to her: "Su bonny, su bonny, be still my grand cow ..." Once she had to slap her hard on the hip. "Quit that, you old fool! Get over! I am not going to untie you and have you walking into trouble! I won't let him come down this way." She did not say how she planned to stop him. She retethered Rose where she could stand down in the creek if she liked. When she came back up the rise with the pail of milk in hand, the lion had not moved. The sun was down, the air above the ridges turning clear gold. The yellow eyes watched her, no light in them. She came to pour milk into the lion's bowl. As she did so, he all at once half rose up. Rains End started, and spilled some of the milk she was pouring. "Shoo! Stop that!" she whispered fiercely, waving her skinny arm at the lion. "Lie down now! I'm afraid of you when you get up, can't you see that, stupid? Lie down now, lion. There you are. Here I am. It's all right. You know what you're doing." Talking softly as she went, she returned to her house of stick and matting. There she sat down as before, in the open porch, on the grass mats. The mountain lion made the grumbling sound, ending with a long sigh, and let his head sink back down on his paws. Rains End got some cornbread and a tomato from the pantry box while there was still daylight left to see by, and ate slowly and neatly. She did not offer the lion food. He had not touched the milk, and she thought he would eat no more in the House of Earth. From time to time as the quiet evening darkened and stars gathered thicker overhead she sang to the lion. She sang the five songs of Going Westward to the Sunrise, which are sung to human beings dying. She did not know if it was proper and appropriate to sing these songs to a dying mountain lion, but she did not know his songs. Twice he also sang: once a quavering moan, like a house cat challenging another tom to battle, and once a long, sighing purr. Before the Scorpion had swung clear of Sinshan Mountain, Rains End had pulled her heavy shawl around herself in case the fog came in, and had gone sound asleep in the porch of her house. She woke with the grey light before sunrise. The lion was a motionless shadow, a little farther from the trunk of the fig tree than he had been the night before. As the light grew, she saw that he had stretched himself out full length. She knew he had finished his dying, and sang the fifth song, the last song, in a whisper, for him: The doors of the
Four Houses Near sunrise she went to milk Rose, and to wash in the creek. When she came back up to the house she went closer to the lion, though not so close as to crowd him, and stood for a long time looking at him stretched out in the long, tawny, delicate light. "As thin as I am!" she said to Valiant, when she went up to Gahheya later in the morning to tell the story and to ask help carrying the body of the lion off where the buzzards and coyotes could clean it. It's still your story, Aunt May; it was your lion. He came to you. He brought his death to you, a gift; but the men with the guns won't take gifts, they think they own death already. And so they took from you the honor he did you, and you felt that loss. I wanted to restore it. But you don't need it. You followed the lion where he went, years ago now. Although she led an itinerant life and is today remembered, if at all, as a politically committed leftist poet, Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948) imbued many of her poems with an intense sense of place and of the natural world. She was born on an apple farm in the small town of Waitsburg, Washington, and moved with her schoolteacher-missionary parents to Hawaii when she was two years old, staying there until she was twenty. After that she "rolled like a marble," eventually graduating from the University of California at Berkeley and living at different times in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, France, Italy, and Spain. She began writing verse when she was thirteen and published eleven books of poetry during her lifetime; the first, For Eager Lovers, appeared in 1922, and her last and favorite, Slow Music, in 1946. Many years after her death, her only child, Marcia D. Liles, assembled a collection of her poems entitled To the Natural World (1980). Taggard taught literature at three colleges, edited four anthologies of poetry and two literary magazines, and wrote book reviews, articles, short stories, and a biography of Emily Dickinson. She penned the following poem, from Slow Music, for her daughter. Demeter was the Greek goddess who brought forth the grain but also withheld her gifts from the earth in grief during the third of the year when her daughter Persephone dwelt in the underworld with Hades. Demeter's advice in Taggard's poem seems to apply to us in this time when to walk in balance with nature requires us to find a new way of being. DEMETER In your dream you
met Demeter
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