Sketchbook

“The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” – Thucydides

Tidying up some odds and ends on this mungy day, I came across some old journals of mine.  Most of the writing was of the quality you’d expect from old journals, but there were a couple of interesting little stories glimmering among the wailing and gnashing of teeth.  In the interest of getting to know your narrator a little better, and not desiring to waste a good word, here are some highlights from the historical record, along with some pages from my old sketchbooks:

August 24th, 2005: I was in the water the other night, in the pool under-water between blue and blue and blue, naked like from-the-womb naked. Had I enough breath and enough night I would have stayed there for years, under the unclothed legs bobbing above and over the grate at the bottom of the deep end. Just the water and the not-a-kid-any-more in the water. Then I surfaced and the summer ended and I cleaned up the empty glasses on the table and the summer ended…

Summer started two years ago with a jump and a splash, and later drying off, Ross said that, well, it’s really summer now. The other night coming out of the blue and blue and blue and seeing the steam rise off the surface, backlit by the moon, sucking in handfuls of breath summer ended, and we got out of the pool. Now it’s time to write the epilogue-that’s-not-an-epilogue to the summer-that’s-not-a-summer. Dry off and say: well.

December 23rd, 2005: The gas generator only ran from nine in the morning to nine at night, so as to save fuel. Late at night, then, once everything was shut down, or just before it, I’d go down to the water’s edge, out on the dock, to collect plankton for the captive fish. The way we did it was to tie a dive-light to one of the pilings and leave it there for an hour or so, then come back with a bucket and scoop up the churning mass of annelids, chaetegnaths, fish larvae, and sundry other miniscule nightmare beasts. Squirt them out of eye-droppers into the fish tanks bright and early next morning.

Anyway, walking out to the dock in the hazy blackness of the tropical nighttime, I’d see pulsing witch-lights in the water. Near the shore the lapping waves’d hurl bioluminescent protozoa at the pilings and the sand, the water emitting greeny flashes that left a pink after-image floating inside my eyeballs. Farther out in the lagoon drifting grey patches heralded foot-wide jellyfish, come up from the deeps to drift about the shallow reefs like bag-ladies in a shopping mall. Down at the end of the pier hung an old gas lantern that barley illuminated the hammock hanging below it and the rough planking of the pier itself. The rushing water below was an even neon black. This was the territory of Roy, the night-watchman.

Roy slept during the day, stretched out in his hammock against a perfect blue tropical horizon. Every night he’d rise and make endless circuits of the island, dodging ghosts and the crocodile.  By the time I’d be getting to the dock to do my fishing, Roy’d be long gone, shuffling through the mangroves on the south end or loitering around the latrines, waiting for the supernatural. The sea was dark and it was scary at that hour, the dimly flashing water and that pathetic little gas-light only making it more so. The stars must have been amazing too, all the equatorial ones I’d never likely read about, but I never had my eyes on anything but my precarious footing and the shivering patch of black just in front of my face. So I’d bucket my evening’s catch, haul up the winking halogen dive-light, and hot foot it back to the lab. During the day the pier was Roy’s, but at night the whole island belonged to the ghost.

A few years back a researcher hanged herself from the lintel of one of the cabins. The staff found her the next day, gently swaying in a westerly breeze, eyes gazing flat on the limitless expanse of the Atlantic. Since then she’s stuck around, frightening the bejeezus out of anyone who strolls anywhere after dark. Henk the Dutchman claimed to have seen her on numerous occasions, but Henk also had a very strange sense of humor and had been in the sun far too long. Ellen, model of wrought-iron Aussie tenacity, was lodging in the ghost’s old cabin- still is; she and Henk are there until January at the earliest. I doubt she believes in ghosts.

Sometimes at night, out on the dock or walking the trails, I’d hear a rustling in the brush or catch a glimpse of a shadow that wasn’t quite a shadow. For a small island it was awfully big when you couldn’t see it. The ghost, the dead scientist, was almost an excuse of ours for the fearful dark of our ignorance of the atoll, lit up in scattered witch-lights under the ever-lapping sea. It wasn’t the ghost that came to me at night and played her spidery fingers over my face, it was my fear of the island itself, and of the foreign deeps.

February 19th, 2006: I don’t know how to write about washing dishes without sounding like I’m complaining. I wouldn’t say that I like doing the dishes, but I enjoy it. I’m not complaining.  Every time somebody cooks, I wash the dishes. I realize I mention washing dishes an awful lot, and I guess that’s because it’s a thing I’ve gotten attached to, that I define myself by. If I ever stopped scrubbing, well I don’t know who I’d be.

When the party’s over and I turn down the lights so it feels like I’m in a Tom Waits song, and the stereo’s playing something old and blue, maybe even Tom Waits, I get down to it and clean ‘em all. Look at what everybody left on their plates- one time I cooked asparagus and beans and stuff, and someone had only eaten the tips, and left the bodies of both all over the plate, a bunch of damn quadriplegic vegetables. I scrub off the plates and rinse out the cups, always the cups last, turn them upside-down on the counter. At the end there’s a little city of everybody’s dinner forgotten on the shore of the sink. Then the next day I get up groggy and put it away, or someone else puts it away, and I’ve already misremembered who had what or if they ate it all, and who left early and why, and who said what, and who was there, and why I got left with the damn dishes again.

Tonight as I was cleaning up, Adrienne cut up a mango and left me a piece in exchange for my washing the knife and the cutting board. Every time I wash the dishes, and I’m not complaining because that’s what I do. You give me a bit of mango, and that’s what you do. I’m not complaining about that either, because I like mangos. I guess I’m dependable; that’s certainly what I say I am, and that’s what gets me bits of mango. Who I am is mostly what I say I am, a little bit the thing inside me, and a little bit the thing inside you. We’re all a series of concepts discussed. We’re all a collection of discrete objects. We’re all in this together. We’re all us. Something like that.

May 27th, 2006: Earlier today I was walking into town and I remembered the one time I ever smoked alone. It must have been February, middle of the night and blustery snowing cold whipped this way and that by the wind. I had a sorry butt of a cigar left over from some party earlier in the winter stashed deep in my coat-pocket, saving it for just this sort of a moment. I waded out into the thrashing lamp-lit whiteness to the little patio at the other end of the concert hall and lit up the bedraggled cigar with the cheap purple lighter I’d picked up years before when I bought cigarettes for Sara because she wasn’t eighteen yet and I was, just. Feeling perfectly miserable, but with the satisfaction that I’d done perfectly miserable perfectly, I smoked and coughed my way through that dead old cigar, head down and collar up to keep the storm out. Then I saw through my sunglasses again and walked the rest of the way into town and forgot to buy milk.

It’s not quite warm-summer-nights yet up here, but the bugs are out, and if there were frogs I could strain to hear them over the traffic noises. Maryland’s got frogs to chirp me to sleep in the mist-muggy middle-of-the-nights, turn off the yellow desk-lamp and clatter the paintbrushes clean. Slide to sleep with an eye cracked for the moon and the fireflies, head soft on the pillow, knees soft in the sheets. Don’t much want to go back though; don’t want to feel nothing about nobody until I hit that soft sand bottom, a year ago in the Gulf of Mexico, Noctiluca whirring lime yellow into my kicking feet. In Maryland: the rafts of fireflies, glittering like candles on the river, bobbing smaller and smaller to the sea; memory receding with the tide.

January 7th, 2007: I think of language as a whirling torrent of words, rushing through the air in front of me. Single, brightly colored words shiver like minnows through clouds of doggerel and occasional linked phrases, mating in the flow. I’m standing there and my hands shoot out, plucking at fragments of sense and anchoring them into place, breakwaters in the rushing tide of gibberish. And that’s sometimes the way I speak, and always the way I write, grasping at whirring dragonfly-fish before they melt away into the tumult…

Christmas eve I was out at Connor’s again. His family was out of town, and I’d been hired to feed the cats. It was a balmy evening, so I took a stroll down through the fields and liminal woods nearby to the spring. Again, I heard the bird-wake before I saw it, alarm calls and small clouds of bluebirds erupting up out of the tall grass before some unseen predator. Stock-still, I watched as a fox trotted onto the trail, bounding now and again after a careless denizen of the field. Slowly, carefully, making a tremendous racket, I followed the creature as far as the center of a fallow field before it grew tired enough of me to scamper off into the woods. At that point I noticed the sky, and the smell of the earth, and the sound of distant Canada geese, and the dying light in blue and orange, and the fact that it was Christmas eve, and the shadows of deer in the forest, and everything. In the tiny scope of a few words, I can’t express that feeling of everything all at once, very fast and loud and soft as moss, gentle as meltwater. It was Christmas eve, the night before the story’s birth of our savior in all this mess. Whose grassy tresses we cling to through thick and thin, who lifts us up in heaving clay to better see whose cloud-scattered rain-giving sky, who is the oceans and the wind and every pumping vacuole in every cell of every stem, whose happenstance we are and in whose grace we cannot help but go. The birth-day of the halo ’round the sunward limn of this, our turning world.

March 10th, 2007: Last night, driving into the City to get food for the trip, I was looking out the cramped backseat window at the row of buildings across the river, towers of lights like the tree-synchronious fireflies of Malaysia. I saw the windowlight reflected in the muddy nighttime black-green water and knew other river memories of another night when the moon was low and hazy. Leaning on the stern-rail of the barge, the thrum and churn of the engine wash casting widening V’s downstream to frame the sky, we talked about not smoking cigarettes and the glow of distant bodies. Later it was dark, the springwater cool and musty, peepers and treefrogs calling dawn down to the rolling purple world. And the sun came, and the river dried to matte green rumbling silt, and in my mind the banks still roll away past sagging willow and glass tower. The half-recounted fog of moonlight on the barge-wake awoke in me a little piece of someone else, staring out the narrow backseat window at the river reaching backwards to the headwaters of a past. The ears of my ears and the eyes of my eyes, and all that, opening…

Well, I’ll take some pinch of this history with me to another shore, and be the river through the river-watching pilot’s eyes. Rafts of fireflies in a humid summer field; the moon suffused in a haze; a jetty thrashed by storm-chased waves; the glow from the city over silhouetted trees; now this: the black river reflecting towers of yellow lights.

July 6th, 2009: I see a colony of manroot vines growing over the BART tracks as I bicycle to work most mornings.  They are tearing the concrete to pieces.  Every spring the thick roots, as big around as your waist, sprout vigorous tendrils that race upwards to the light, seeking any chink in bark or cement.  Come summertime, the spiny fruit is thick on the vine and the leaves are browning for the summer drought.  They have been here since the bay was dry prairie, grazed by creatures that, from a distance, looked almost like elk.  They have seen the small, beautiful people crushed into the mist of songs from which they were sung.  They have seen the forests hewn into park benches.  They have seen the rapid transit system, and they have seen the bridges, and they have seen the tenements, and they have seen the gunfights, and they have seen the roads.  They are growing over the BART tracks; in the shadow of the mountain, the manroot is growing over the BART tracks.  Every morning I see these plants and I remember a little more.

When I sleep I hear bŭbŭm ‘cham, the wind-lessening, wind-singing trees speaking in tall voices in the green-dark places of the world.  In the Yuba, in the cold fish-bright water, I remember floating below the moonlight in a Maryland swimming pool.  It was the last night, and I was the last in the water, under the water, naked in the moon.  I close my eyes, and forget about the poker players, and the walls, and the road noise, and I can hear far-off the sound of shell beads clinking together, so soft, so gentle, like water.

Birds in the Bush

Juvenile Sharp-Shinned Hawk by yours truly

I’ve been noticing a ferocious abundance of hawks lately.  Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s mostly, though I’ve heard the cries and seen pairs of circling red-tailed and broad-winged Buteos almost daily.  I wonder if this recent predatory incursion into my field of vision has more to do with the turning of the season or with the development of my own sensitivity to the goings-on of the woodland world.  The passerines (that’s song-birds to the rest of us, the perching birds from crows to titmice that populate the order Passeriformes) have been preoccupied with each other lately, belting out lewd odes and territorial calls to arms from sunup to sundown.  So distracted, the amorous robins and bellicose sparrows are easy pickings for the circling keen-eyed Accipiters.

The other day I was riding with someone out of D.C. when a Cooper’s hawk jinked right in front of our windshield, and then into an alley between two row-houses.  “Whoa!” I exclaimed, “did you see that?”  “See what?” my friend asked, momentarily oblivious.  It gave me pause- I’m not so far removed from being a city person myself to wonder, what am I missing that’s in front of my face right now?

A crash in the bamboo thicket heralded the arrival of a young sharp-shinned hawk, stricken junco in talon, to her habitual perch, three meters away from my own resting place halfway up an ash tree.  Stifling a sneeze, I leveled out my breathing and heartbeat, and strove to become as still and invisible as possible.  (Have you ever tried to make yourself calm when you’re really excited about something?  How on earth were you able to do it?)  The hawk craned her face in my direction, peering at me through one eye and then another, peeping uncertainly.  Not at all convinced that I was simply an unusually shaped tree-limb, she worried at the junco briefly, glanced again in my direction, and exited the bamboo for a more secure perch.  The ground under the bent bamboo-stem was speckled with old blood, ragged feathers, and the remnants of droppings scoured by rain.

There’s homework to be done here: I’m not at all certain that “she” was a she, nor am I comfortable asserting that the junco I saw was, in fact, a junco.  How often does this particular bird come to this particular place?  Where in her territory does it lie?  Where’d she catch the junco (or whoever it was) and how’d she get the jump on him?  Does she have a partner or is she running solo?  For every one fact or facet of the living world I think I have figured out, twenty more erupt from the undergrowth and scatter before I can get a good look at them.

Straight Line People

Mohenjo Daro, Sindh, Pakistan

“The Yoruba associate line with civilization: ‘ This country has become civilized,’ literally means in Yoruba, ‘this earth has lines upon its face.’” – Clifford Geertz, Art as a Cultural System

Why do we build square houses?  Individuals acquainted with hands-on construction may attest to the relative ease of joining a snug frame when the corner angles are kept to a common 90 degrees, as compared to the math and carpentry involved in building timber-framed ovals, triangles, and non-Euclidean monstrosities.  Trees make for exemplary home construction materials; the linear shapes found in trunks and limbs coupled with the sturdy indigestibility of lignin lend wood a singular suitability for constructions designed to be load-bearing and permanent.  Nearly every building we see is characterized by echoes of the linear design vocabulary required by wood-framing.  Even when more malleable substances like plastic, concrete, or steel are used to provide support and structure, the shapes- rectangles, squares, the odd vaulted ceiling- remain consistent with older forms.  Even within superficially novel contemporary architectural creations (the ones designed for practicality rather than spectacle, at least) the interior landscape remains one of linear corridors, rectangular rooms, and square cubicles and closets.  The engineering supports the conventions of linear architecture, but where did the conventions come from?

The architecture of people who spend their lives around trees, and pay notice to this fact, is very different from our own contemporary ‘squares and lines’ design vocabulary.  Rectangular buildings are common to nearly all wood-using cultures, but- and here’s the kicker- most of the time nobody lived in ‘em.  The exceptions to this convention are raised structures inhabited by necessity in places of regular flooding, such as the stilt houses built by people living along the Amazon, Missouri, and Mekong rivers, and by parallel convention, as in the marae of Maori country; stable support for a rectangular structure is much easier and more reliable than rigging up stilts for a round house.  Where timber-framing and right angles do occur with remarkable consistency across cultures is in communal feasting-halls and in structures built to house the equipment of male mystery societies.  Sleeping structures, whether made of boughs or mammoth bones, cob or stone, tend to be circular in form.  As a mad Dutch architect friend of mine put it to me, “would you rather live in a womb or a phallus?”

Experiments in intentionally designing womb-like indoor gathering spaces have been undertaken from Arcosanti to Mumbai.  Mark Lakeman, sometime hetman of City Repair tells a story about the construction of an ovate women’s space in a Portland, OR neighborhood.  Strange synchronicities dogged the building of the space, and once finished visitors reported feelings of deep and powerful compassion, even before the space was furnished.  Throughout the construction, the builders experienced intense dreams of Olympian goddesses, the Virgin Mary, Kali, the pre-Indo-European Earth Mother, and other notable personages exemplary of feminine prowess.  All this just from hammering some bits of wood together in a circle.

So how did permanence, maleness, and the structural possibility of a second floor come to outweigh psychological comfort when it came to the construction of our home-buildings?  What would happen if a tree stove in the roof of your house?  Who would build you a new sleeping place?  Why did the dwellers of Mohenjo Daro and Ur forsake their grandmothers’ round houses and line their family compounds straight-edged along the avenues when the city walls engulfed their villages?  When were the round sod houses of rural Scots and Danes abandoned for stone cottages, and what else was happening in these places at the time?  If you wanted to build a garden shed, what shape would it be?  What does the shape of Wyoming have to do with the shape of English sheep enclosures?  Where does the Christian god dwell; where does the Earth Mother dwell?  Which is more noble, a skyscraper or a bungalow; why?  In Yoruba country, who built the first cinder-block structure?  Find the common thread linking these puzzles: it is one of the core stories of our people.

The Tzutujil Mayan village of Santiago Atitlán did without doors from its founding several thousand years ago until the early 1980′s.  Martín Prechtel, refugee shaman and raconteur, tells the story of the coming of doors to the village in Secrets of the Talking Jaguar (I think).  After millennia of relative security and stability, theft, domestic violence, and other social ills erupted overnight.  Without doors, anyone may visit at any time; there is no border between one’s public and private life.  One cannot, in a fit of anguish or rage, shut the rest of the world out and allow the self’s shadow free reign.  Without doors, when you’re hurting, everyone knows it and out of that everyone, someone’s bound to come help.  When obstructions are placed to the flow of loving attention throughout the village, fear and anger breed unchecked.  In climate-controlled apartment buildings, how emotionally close do neighbors tend to be?  Why do you choose to live in a house with doors?  Or central heating:

“Manteled chimneys, built into the walls, were a feature in every part of [Castle Coucy].  As distinct from a hole in the roof, these chimneys were a technological advance of the 11th century that by warming individual rooms, brought lords and ladies out of the common hall where all had once eaten together and gathered for warmth, and separated owners from their retainers.  No other invention brought more progress in comfort and refinement, although at the cost of a widening social gulf.” – Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

Much of what shapes our lives remains invisible so long as we do not look at it.  What else constitutes the pattern language of the built environment?

Tlalocan

Fragment of a mural of Tlaloc from the city of Teotihuacán.  Photo by Hélène de Fays

Rain’s been falling for two days.  Soft grey clouds hold the warmth of another Indian summer close to the earth.  Ground ivy and chickweed cling to the ground in a riot of verdure.  It’s good tea weather.

Weather patterns remain one of the many natural processes that resist accurate description and prediction by the most detailed scientific methods of the day.  Winds and clouds are, we are told, too mathematically chaotic to ken.  It’s that story about the butterfly and the hurricane.

The name of the Nahua high spirit of rain, Tlaloc, means ‘the one who covers the valleys’, i.e. the dense stratus clouds that lie low on the land when rainy weather comes.  It’s worth noting that Tlaloc is not responsible for or symbolic of rainy weather; Tlaloc is rainy weather.  We can choose to relate to powerful inhuman natural forces as blind, dumb, unfeeling phenomena absent of spirit or intelligent agency (“dense stratus clouds”) or as species of mysterious personhood.  Material accuracy may not be the only criterion in the comparative value of worldviews.  How does it feel to walk through a rainy day?  (Wet.)  How does it feel to walk within a god?

In Maid^ country, when kadiki ‘kitdom (kadiki- can you hear the sound of rain in it?) go outside without an umbrella for a little while.  The rain washes sins and bad luck right out of you if you let it fall on your head.  All our food comes from the union of rain and soil- no plants grow without both, no animals grow without plants.  Mushrooms good for food, good for medicine, good for holding the forest together, good for enriching the soil, good for the eyes spring up in hours when the raindrops hit the duff.  Groundwater that feeds springs and wells, grain fields and orchards, that drips and flows to hollow out grand caves and erect stalagmites and flowstone falls first from the sky.  Rain and fog ease the overland passage of Atlantic eels in their cross-continental journeys.  Ponds, vernal pools, puddles are filled with cloud-water, then frogspawn and baby salamanders.  There are few feelings quite so satisfying as walking into a warm, bright home with hot stew steaming on the stove and good company all around after a long day in the mud and rain.  The wetter the air, the warmer the hearth.

Rain isn’t the only natural force that does nice things for us, but it’s here right now.  Let the droplets dapple your brow.  What do you smell?  What sounds can you hear?  Any differences in how your senses are functioning compared to dry weather?  Where are the birds?  How do the little plants that grow around the base of the trees look?  How does the rain taste?  What symbols, images, or feelings come up for you when you stand in the rain?

Beautiful Heresies

In The Tobacco Field by Adrian Mealand

The morning unfurled out of the east with an orange bloom, reaching narrow fingers along gullies and streamsides, calling brassy through corridors of hickory and oak.  Reddening leaves in the reddening light- harvest time is come to a head.  One great feast of chestnuts and pumpkins ripens to fruit before the too-long senescence of the forest garden into the death dream of wintertime.  North of here, the frost is on the apple trees.

“Land is a verb, place is a process,” remarked Jeanette Armstrong, Okanagan elder, teacher, and emissary of the En’owkin tradition of peacemaking, in an air-conditioned room in San Rafael, California, along a tidal stream, beside some planted toyons when the song sparrows were calling in the afternoon.  What does this mean?

To a housefly, a film projected onto a screen would appear as a series of still photographs, so much more quick than ours is their visual awareness.  Many perennial plants- Jerusalem artichoke, thyme, willow, etc.- can continue living, thriving even, nigh on forever in the right conditions with attentive care.  What slow, rhythmic understandings emerge from the experiences of these plants?  How are the winters reckoned to an 800 year old grape vine, gnarled through the windows of a crumbling castle greenhouse?  The dance of the continents is measured in millions of years.  One million years ago, we were all Africans.  From these frames of reference, nothing on this living Earth is static.  Birth, growth, senescence, death, of individuals, of families, of species, of communities, of ecosystems, of whole epochs of living diversity, nothing remains that is not changed, nothing changes that does not also remain.

We are used to describing the experience of life in mechanical terms.  Even those of us unenamored of the grossly technophilitic metaphors of the brain as computer or the body as self-regulating machine still use mechanical language to memorialize our visions of the living world.  We refer to the “processes” of the world’s “systems”  in empty, generic terms, classifying endless climatic “zones”, phylogenetic lineages, and geographical “features”.  Even the permaculturalist is not immune, poring over her tables of ecological equivalents and proscribed rootstock characteristics.  Labels are useful, but perhaps the mindset that generates them- and often leads to a confusion of the map for the terrain- is not.  Another language of relationship is needed.

A person experiences a different sort of relationship with a static object than they do with an entity in motion.  Even an inanimate mechanism like a speeding train requires the one who walks on its tracks to submit to the negotiation of movement.  And no thing on the Earth is static.  Even the stones change shape and position, odor and texture with time and conversation with weather and roots.  Everything on this or any earth responds, moves, reacts, and thus affects others, creates other changes.  What register of these changes exists in the hearts of stones?  Where does the learning of your own life live?  Is there really such a difference between the life of a human and the life of a stone so as to preclude all conversation?  Anyway, start with plants, they’re far more talkative…

Every morning the Earth tilts to the sun, every winter she turns away.  Every contra dance ends with the dancers in their starting position, ready for the fiddler to strike up the next tune.  Every autumn the harvest rolls in, sometimes rich, sometimes poor, but never does summer follow from fall.  From the figure-eight flap of a grouse’s wings to the whorl of the milkweed’s leaves, to the long-short beat of a heart or the butterfly swimmer’s stroke, life runs in contrary cycles.  A thousand green centuries followed by a hundred years of burning cities.  Long-short, inhale-exhale, dawn-evening, grief-praise, celebration-lament, weaving-unraveling, full-empty, life-death, togetherness-solitude: necessary cycles, necessary paradox.  How shall we speak to the dawn that rises every day for the first time?

The Tupelo and the Ailanthus

Kudzu performing ecological repair in temporarily deforested Athens, GA.  Photo from Creative Loafing.

We are surrounded by infant old-growth forests.  Every woodland that manages to avoid the perils of drought, storm, disease, crown fire, and unscrupulous human beings will grow more stately, beautiful, bountiful, and biodiverse as the years march on.  While we are currently in the opening stages of what is likely to prove the most comprehensive mass extinction since the end of the Permian, old trees are tough to shift.

Forests typically outlast cities.  Think about how permanent Angkor Wat, Altun Ha, Pripyat, or Namie seemed to their builders and inhabitants.  Consider the street trees in your nearest urban area; what will happen to the sidewalks, roadways, water pipes, electrical lines, and nearby buildings as their root systems and branches expand?  Given the state of local municipal budgets these days, will there be the money or inclination to repair that interruption by the time these saplings grow old enough to cause it?  Which is more valuable to an increasingly food-insecure populace, high-speed internet or plums?  Suburban landscapes across North America are perennially one growing-season month of lawn-mowing away from reversion to meadow and thicket.  “Pripyat began returning to nature as soon as the people left, and there was no one to trim and prune and weed,” remarks botanist Svitlana Bidna in Mary Mycio’s book Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, “It takes a lot of human effort to maintain urban landscapes.”  What effects might the collapsing US economy have on urban and suburban wildlands?

What species will constitute these forests as time goes on?  How will the landscape smell, how will it look, what sounds will be heard?  Who will live here?  I’ve wanted to spend some words on the subject of living in a mass extinction event for some time, but until recently my ideas have been formless and unfocused.  It took an evening’s reflection under an old blackgum tupelo to clarify the issues at hand.

The phrase ‘mass extinction’ summons up images of sudden asteroids and freezing dinosaurs, or hectares of rainforest churned into McDonald’s feedlots, but this is somewhat misleading.  While multi-species die-offs are considered sudden in a geological time-frame, they take rather a while to play out for those individuals experiencing them in person.  The great Permian-Triassic ‘event’ responsible for the loss of 83% of all (known) genera lasted a million years at its peak, and may well have been preceded by other die-offs spaced at five million year intervals.  The end of the Permian was celebrated with a couple of serious planetary benders followed by a fifteen million year hangover.

Our current extinction seems set to occur much more rapidly.  The massive ecosystem destabilization our cultural forebears initiated when they first put plow to topsoil and axe to oak some 16,000 years ago did not help matters.  The subsequent rapidity with which the Earth’s oceans are warming exacerbates the trend further.  Moreover, we Westerners have befouled the waters, air, soil, bedrock, and bodies of this planet with some of the most persistently toxic chemicals present this side of the galaxy.  Some have argued that these factors have all but guaranteed a rapid die-off of everything more anthropomorphic than E. coli and bread mold.  While we may yet be set to lose closer to 90% of all (known) genera over a geologically brief timespan (many of the more huggable ones during your and my lifetimes) I do not think that we have seen the last of the ecosystems called forest, reef, chaparral, or prairie.  Eukaryotic life has shown surprising resilience in the past; one ought not underestimate the regenerative prowess of growing plants.

Before charging ahead, take a minute to let the reality of mass extinction sink in.  No more polar bears.  No more honeybees.  No more whales.  No more tigers.  No more elephants.  No more bananas.  No more frogs.  You will see this happen.  No more redwoods.  No more sea turtles.  No more butterflies.  No more eagles.  No more cedars.  No more fireflies.  Amphibians, who hold the lineage of the first vertebrate on land, stand to disappear in a welter of chemical mutation and slime-choked lungs within the next handful of decades.  The lifestyle that includes reading and writing computerized essays is wholly responsible for this situation.  You and I have taken part in behavior that is killing the most beautiful creatures in the world.  You and I have soiled innumerable iridescent feathers with dull sludge.  You and I have razed sun-dappled glades that were old before our great-grandparents were born.  You and I have killed from afar with weapons called factories and power plants, and we have killed eye to eye on dark roads at 70 miles per hour late at night while no other human was watching.  Tempting as it is to succumb to mea culpas, mail a check to the Sierra Club, and forget all about it in the morning, extinction is bigger than our guilt.  We among the living, among the ancestors of the canny survivors, have a duty to the world to live well.  The dying must be tended with care and compassion, the dead wept for, and the living richly fed with the fruits of our lives.  Learn from our mistakes, live, and help the world to grow in richness even in a time of decay.

By storm and toxin, drought and flame, who will persist to sustain the spark of life through the next fifteen million years of calamity?  It’s that hardy 17% of Permian survivors who we must look to, that 17% who became 100% over many aching millennia of suspiciously similar forest types, sudden storms, and frequent wildfires.  The organisms that survive mass extinctions tend to be either generalists or very lucky.  Further words will be spent on each type in future essays.

It seems to be to the general benefit of eukaryotic life as a whole that resilient, fast-growing, opportunistic, hardy organisms like starlings and Ailanthus have been spread to the four corners of the Earth by deranged European explorer-types, all negative press to the contrary.  The Earth doesn’t always operate for our convenience at a human pace or in accordance with a Western aesthetic.  Life is frequently and necessarily ugly to our eyes.  In the event of a planetary emergency, the lions, tigers, and (panda) bears are toast any way you look at it, but rats?  While we all, pigeons, toads, tree-ferns, and featherless bipeds alike, would have greatly benefited had not a bunch of ancestral yahoos decided to take more from the land than they were given, we have nevertheless arrived at the present situation.  Our land ethic regarding invasive or rampant species must stem from a careful appraisal of our actual, rather than ideal, predicament, including the possible and probable futures depending from that predicament.  Biodiversity often acts as a means to the ultimate end of resiliency.  The health of the forest is more important than the health of any individual tree, or any individual species; the existence of the ecosystem is vastly more important than its health or complexity at any one given minute, generation, or century.  When dealing with unprecedented climatic fluctuations and a stew of persistent, bioaccumulative toxins unseen before on this planet, it makes only a short-sighted sort of sense to uproot, further poison, and otherwise attempt to extirpate the sorts of species most likely to survive the hard times to come.  The older the forest, the more resilient it is.  Let the weeds establish themselves, either mourn the displaced species or tend them actively so that they need not be displaced, and help the forest be a forest.

But back to the suburban old-growth.  The long-lived organisms of our present environs may yet prove to be the last of their kind.  Old trees are tough- once a plant reaches its second century in good health, not much is going to shake it for the next five (arborists put down your billhooks, I’m generalizing here).  Infant trees, however, are much more susceptible to climatic shenanigans and other disturbances.  The relatively slight waves of localized extinction over the past three-odd million years were marked by changes in forest composition caused by the shift of climatic zones across the landscape faster than the trees themselves could relocate their offspring.  As we are now staring down an extremely rapid shift in average and extreme local temperatures, to say nothing of rainfall, winds, fire, etc., we can also expect that many of our grandmother trees will never shelter their own grandchildren.  (I wonder what type of creature could carry infant trees from one climatic zone to another faster than the trees themselves would migrate, thus preserving some degree of biodiversity in the landscape…)  If you, me, and all our neighbors decide not to destroy the trees in our neighborhoods nor tolerate their destruction, and if we tend these trees with care and skill, and if, moreover,  we teach our children to love them well, they will remain in our world, growing richer, livelier, and more beautiful with every year.  The old-growth woods of the more picturesque places of the world are here in the American suburbs.  Every place on Earth has burned to the ground, been buried in a mudslide, drowned under floodwaters, toppled, changed.  Now the land is grey over green.  The forests of your elderhood may be more Ailanthus than tupelo, the skies more English sparrow than goldfinch, the meadows more knotweed than milkweed, but such is our world that we must depend whole-heartedly upon these most resilient of our neighbors.  Once there was fire, later there will be fire, now there is forest, tomorrow there is forest.

Bonus Box!:

For more information about some efforts made to rethink the old invasive species paradigm, see this excellent post from my friend and long time partner in crime Connor Stedman’s blog.

Parasitism

Cree women picking blueberries, 1926.  Photograph by Edward S. Curtis.

It’s a good year for mulberries.  The regular rainfall of last month prompted a frenzy of blooms, and now this small dry spell has concentrated the sugars in the fruit to a delectable sweetness.  I’ve been coursing the neighborhood lately, scanning the sidewalk for tell-tale purple stains and keeping a lone eye peeled for hidden pawpaws, honeysuckle pan pipes at my lips.  As aquifers in the Midwest continue to dry out, economies the world over chase their tails, and climatic shenanigans rake the continent’s thin skin, the specter of food security stalks the Maryland suburbs in a floppy hat.  It’s eleven o’clock in the Western world; do you know where your fruit trees are?

Practical matters aside (but seriously: if your local supermarket stopped selling food, what would you eat?) these recent adventures in foraging have spurred me to think about our (we computer users, we book-readers, etc.) role in the landscape in yet another light.  Many words have been spent describing Westernized human activities like mining and agriculture as parasitic, in the vampires and tapeworms sense of the word.  While those of us reliant on supermarkets for food, municipal pipes for water, foreign mines for the metal in our cars and cell ‘phones, and so on, are indeed sucking the life out of lands, peoples, and other species- usually far enough away from our attention that we can pretend otherwise- I’m much more interested in how we relate to the places in which we perform our day-to-day living.

Parasite, if you remember from your high-school biology class, comes to us from the Greek parasitos, ‘eating beside another’ as in one’s neighbor at a banquet.  The parasitikoi were hangers-on at the wild parties the wealthier classes used to throw in old-time Athens; they came, they saw, they mumbled quietly: wallflowers.  I’m sure you’ve encountered someone like this at a party before, the earnest and glum sort who despite never seeming to open his or her mouth nevertheless manages to eat all of the cucumber sandwiches.  Hell, we’ve all been there on one off-night or another, so maybe you’ve felt sympathetic enough to go over to one of these frail creatures and strike up a conversation.  Five minutes into an airless exchange and perhaps you have gained some insight into how that blandly innocent term, ‘the eater beside another’ came to take on such grim and lurid connotations.

As the half-empty drink and vague smile are to the reluctant party-goer, the hiking boot and factory-made “trail mix” are to the would-be outdoorsperson.  While we’ve managed to get up the gumption to go out and see what the scene’s all about, we’re so stuck in our heads that we brandish our defenses lest we let the world slip in, our selves slip out, and, heaven forfend, actually have a good time.  The same applies to the gourmet who turns time into money into food without cutting out the middle man, and to the gardener who loves plants, yet grows only European annuals.  The architecture of suburbia is the structural equivalent of a conversation about the weather; it keeps out what everyone, deep down inside, wants to let in.

We of the city and the road are parasites on the land, in the boring dinner guest sense.  We’re rude, not by intent but simply because we’re too wrapped up in our own concerns to take an interest in anyone else; we’re not nearly intoxicated enough, and we repeat the same dull stories to anyone who’ll listen.  You see, the coyotes in the den need someone to sing tenor to make up the harmony, and the trees in the kitchen have been waiting for ages for someone with thumbs to show up, and that pretty Io moth has been making eyes at you all night, and, well, it’s an awful quiet solar system, and this really is the only happening place around.  You might as well shuck your overcoat and mingle for a spell, see what comes up.

Wherever you are, somebody is ripe enough to eat.  Our landscapes have changed radically since the last time human being people hit the ecological dance-floor.  The old dances still work, even with new partners, and there are nascent moves and beats so fresh they have yet to be performed.  Get to know your fellow revelers this summer: make a flower crown, follow a raccoon, go fishing with a bent paper clip and a pokeweed-cord line, eat too many wild plums.  Me, I’m off to the creek in my dancing shoes; it’s a crap year for crawdads, but you never know who you’re going to run into along the way.

Bonus Box!:

Check out this fantastic essay on mulberries, social guilt, and delicious shortcakes by fellow Mid-Atlantician Brynn Slate.

River to River

Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, Maryland

Jayi Canyon, Navajo Nation

“The world as men have made it is an ungainly
hardship that comes of forgetting
there is other life than men have made.
While the summer’s growth kept me
anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river
where it flowed, faithful to its way,
beneath the slope where my household
has taken its laborious stand.
I could not reach it even in dreams.

Honeysuckle, Northwest Branch

Desert daisies, Marble Gorge

But one morning at the summer’s end
I remember it again, as though its being
lifts into mind in undeniable flood,
and I carry my boat down through the fog,
over the rocks, and set out.
I go easy and silent, and the warblers
appear among the leaves of the willows,
their flight like gold thread
quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.

Pignut Hickory, Northwest Branch

Natural arch, Jayi Canyon

And I go on until I see crouched
on a dead branch sticking out of the water
a heron- so still that I believe
he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.
And then I see the articulation of feather
and living form, a brilliance I receive
beyond my power to make, as he
receives in his great patience
the river’s providence.  And then I see
that I am seen, admitted, my silence
accepted in his silence.  Still as I keep,
I might be a tree for all the fear he shows.
Suddenly I know I have passed across
to a shore where I do not live.”

-  The Heron, Wendell Berry

Anacostia River

Navajo Creek

Hornbrook Pastoral

After much trial and travail, lots of words and a lengthy silence, I am departing the hills of Hornbrook, California for my home lands of the Maryland piedmont.  I spent the winter here alone, tending the oak woods, Ceanothus scrub, and new gardens for my dear friends Lara and Derek while they were off having exciting adventures in Central America.  They’ve since returned, and have been building on my winter’s work to create a burgeoning market garden, edible hedge system, forest orchard, and greywater paradise.  The land here has a good spirit to it, and the people are generous.

Derek tending the new raspberries.

Buckbrush (Ceanothus cuneatus) Mountain Mahogany (Cercocarpus betuloides) and Oregon White Oak (Quercus garryana) scrubland.

This plant is called “fireweed” by locals.  It secretes a minor skin irritant, and seems to thrive in marginal soils.  Does anyone know the highfalutin name for this plant?

When we started, this whole area was hard-packed dirt with gravel mixed in.  Lots of sheet mulch was added, as was the massive rainwater tank, and the greenhouse.  I threw together a temporary arbor to hold the kiwis and hops this year (if they decide to brave the looming summer and extend some tendrils upward) with plans in the works to put up a sturdier structure once the plants are more established.  The arbor is located over the tank for the well water, with the intention of utilizing the shade provided by the vining plants to keep the tank cool.  The stones in the garden are arranged in a series of spirals inspired by the arc of a scorpion’s tail.  All winter long the wind kept blowing the top layer of mulch off.  While moving some rocks around one blustery day in yet another fore-doomed attempt to create a windbreak, a little scorpion crawled out from a crevice in the hillside and told me what to do.  Sunflowers, beans, lettuces, assorted wildflowers, weeds, and Jerusalem artichokes are all coming up.  Squashes, gojis, Lonicera, and a few other odds and ends will be added to this garden later in the season.

Ten points and a bright, shiny nickle to the reader who can guess who lives here.

Evening looking out towards Mary’s Peak.

Sunset under the Grandmother juniper.

Alpenglow on Mount Shasta.

The Language of Myth, Part 2: Tall Stories

Modern storytelling technology.  Art by Frank Cozzorelli

Hwæt!

A story I have heard runs:

‘Once there was a people free of want, though at times the rain brought chill, and the winter, hunger.  They lived and told stories, and saw their hearts reflected in the face of the land, and when they died, they died knowing their spirits and ancestors attended them.  One day strange people came, who spoke with harsh voices and wore clothing like armor.  The strangers said, “what we desire we take, and what we take we ruin until we no longer desire it, and this is the Only True Way.  The world is made of nothing but things for us to take- you are all things, the mountains are things, the trees and all the animals, also.  We, too, are but things to one another, and this is the Only True Way.  Your spirits and your ancestors are lies you tell yourselves because, despite your smiles and welcoming gestures, despite your fitness and health, you are more miserable even than we.  You must worship a spirit as miserable as we know you to be (for we can never be mistaken) for this is the Only True Way.  The Names of this spirit are many, though you will know It by Its effect.  Some call our one true god Commerce, others Government.  Some know It as Technology, Church, Science, Literacy, Bureaucracy, Law, or Power, but all must accede that whatever the Name, it is the Only True Way.”  And the people looked at one another and said (for they were a courteous people) “what you speak of is difficult to understand, so far below your god-like magnificence are we.  Pray, tell us how you, in your wisdom, would have us live.”  The strangers looked at one another with lean and hungry faces, and the leanest and hungriest of them all then spoke, “you must submit to my will, for I am the loneliest, the fiercest, the vainest, the most callous of my people, so is status accorded among us.  What I decree, you must perform on pain of torture.  I desire the wood of the forests, that I might hide myself from the attention of the world; kill them all and build with their bodies a gilded cage.  I desire the comeliest of your maidens, that I might frighten them and destroy their self worth, for so do my people take our pleasure.  I desire that all should suffer as I suffer, for perhaps then I will not feel so lonely, so fierce, so vain, and so callous.  You must destroy your gardens and cease your conversation with the birds of the air and the plants of the wood, for we find this threatening though we do not know why.  You must dig up the earth and grow these weak and short-lived plants in the ruin, and you must never again eat of the fruits of the wild.  You must spend your days in pain and boredom, for this is the Only True Way.  You must learn to fear those who can harm you, and harm those who do not yet fear you, until all are fearful of all.  You must forget that it was ever otherwise, for there is only one true story, and we are so generous that we shall share it with you.”  A pregnant silence grew about the assembled crowd, and uncertain looks were exchanged.  “You ask much of us, strangers,” one of the people said, “you offer us a life of drudgery, forgetfulness, fear, agony, and confusion, yet you seem so certain that it is the only true way.  I wonder what great misfortune has disordered your thoughts so, and if we might aid you in your healing.”  The strangers then seized upon that one and tore her apart before setting her body aflame.  “She did not follow the Only True Way,” was all the strangers said in explanation.  The people were unnerved, but seeing the great potency of the strangers, they acceded, and submitted, and were drained of life and filled with the ravening emptiness of the Only True Way.  “Thou good and faithful servants,” the strangers declared, gimlet eyes gleaming, “you have served us well.  Though your toil has been long and difficult, and though you have endured much hardship, look what changes you have brought upon the face of the land:  Where once were lush forests and meadows are now amber waves of grain and whirring, dead, metropoleis.  Where once were rivers strong, free, and clear are now neatly caged reservoirs, teeming with contagion.  Where once the air was pure and the water sweet are now black clouds and poisonous sludge.  It is a small pity, perhaps, that our desire for the bodies of the earth have resulted in such ugliness, hazard, and ruination, but such is the inevitable price of the Only True Way.  Turn your sight away from these unpleasantnesses, look not at your brothers and sisters confined by chains to benches where they shed their lives in meaningless labor.  Gaze instead on such wonders as we have wrought!”  And the people looked and saw towers of metal and stone.  They saw forests hewn into books, where the Only True Way was said to dwell.  They saw acres of buzzing, whirring machines.  They felt their bellies always full, though of what they did not know.  Their eyes were dazzled by bright lights and their ears bombarded with new sounds.  And the people knew the glory that was Lady Gaga and High Speed Internet, and there was much rejoicing, for their every want was answered.  They had come to know the Only True Way, and the people became as strangers to themselves, forever.’

A myth is a true story.  Let me explain what I mean:  The word ‘myth’ comes to us directly from the Greek mythos, meaning both a narrative story and any of its component words.  In this sense, a myth is holographic (i.e. every individual part contains the pattern of the whole) and indeed it would not be too far to guess that at one point in the history of the eastern Mediterranean the whole of the world was taken to be a sort of story, of which every narrative action or spoken word was an integral and defining part.  Mythos emerged through some process of migration and recombination from the very old Proto-Indo-European root mm (pronounced, ‘mu’) one of the most foundational of our onomatopoetic vocabulary.  Mm represents the first noises made by infants, the cooing, gurgling hum that forms the basis for every language thereafter learned.  ‘Myth’, then, refers to a story of primordial origin and impact that relates the teller and the audience in an integral way with the rest of the universe.  The folk-definition of  ‘myth’ as an obviously untrue story (usually valued highly by some foreign, unsophisticated nation of people) is quite recent, dating only to the 1840′s, though the barbarous practice of disparaging the stories of others is a firm standard of Western textual religions, shared by contemporary sects from Shia Islam to textbook science.

The word ‘true’ comes to us intact from the indigenous Germanic languages of the formerly dense Northern European woodlands.  The Proto-Germanic trewwjaz refers to one characterized by good faith, trustworthiness, or reliability.  Delve deeply enough, and eventually we get to the Proto-Indo-European root shared by so many of our good words: dru, or tree.  In the forests of old Europe, the gold-standards of reliability were the trees, especially the great oaks that once grew in glades across the continent.  To be compared to a tree was the ultimate compliment on one’s honesty, hence our modern word.  These roots appear to have been forgotten relatively recently.  The word ‘true’ was coopted by the Church in the 1200′s, its definition deliberately altered from ‘honest and reliable’ to ‘consistent with fact’ (i.e. orthodox interpretation of Biblical scripture).  By the 1500′s ‘true’ had been reinterpreted by the scholastic establishment to mean ‘agreement to a given standard’, which is the sense we frequently use it in today (a “true” story doesn’t contain anything smacking of mystery, spirit, numinosity, imagination, or anything else anomalous under the dominant paradigm).  Interestingly, the true/false dichotomy only emerged in 1923, as a type of question on tests given out as part of a move to mechanize education to a state of ‘agreement with a given standard’.  The increasing narrowness in meaning of this formerly quite beautiful word follows the trend in our culture’s history of increasing authoritarian and bureaucratic power, greater disassociation from wild nature, including the wild and irregular aspects of our selves, and rising faith in the written word and the say-so of distant authorities over local oral history and direct experience.  Every word tells a story; the ending is not yet written.

Myths, be they sagas of legendary heroes, trickster tales, esoteric metaphors for cosmic principles, teaching stories, comic stories, mysterious stories that begin in the middle and have no endings, mnemonic models of the creation of the universe, or any of a hundred other types are essential to the health of human communities.  The archetypal heroes, monsters (from the Latin monstrum: a sign, portent, or warning) guides, spirits, and antagonists of well-remembered myths are the strong threads that a human being weaves her unique life around.  When fear and uncertainty loom large, we can gain strength and understanding from these archetypes and progress through the trials of our lives undaunted.  Good myths warn us against taking actions that have led to disaster in the past, and encourage us to stretch our comfort zones to secure heroic feats.  By celebrating certain types of deeds and condemning others, myths play a role in the determination of a society’s values and the behavior of its members; there is something to be learned from the global distribution of the archetypes of antagonistic braggart and humble savior.

‘…In the darkest of his days, his family killed by the machinations of enemies, Hiawatha wandered vaguely south, his thoughts contorted by sorrow.  He trudged across many lands, unmindful of winter’s bite or spring’s caress, until he reached the edge of a wide reed-filled lake.  Uncaring, he continued to walk on, though he would meet his end submerged in the mud.  Ducks and geese, seeing the depths of his despair, took pity on the exile and stooped to bear the water away from his path, that he might cross to the other side.  As the water was carried away, Hiawatha looked down and noticed the bright white shells of freshwater clams glinting in the black mud of the lake bottom.  He collected these shells, and on the far back stopped to string them into patterns expressing his grief.  He stayed on the shore for many days, contemplating the condolences he had woven out of the fruits of the lake, before rising, his grief assuaged, to share his tale and resume his diplomatic mission…’

Legends like this one, part of the Haudenosaunee epic cycle of the Peacemaker, act as bridges between events and experiences of the present generation and those of the ancestors’ times.  In cultures where history isn’t just a collection of names and dates, the lessons taught by past events are recalled significantly, with relatively little loss of meaning over time.  The traumas of the Five Nations War were remembered ever afterward for the next 2,000 years, and indeed the member nations of the Haudenosaunee confederacy never again made war on one another.  Imagine if the stories we told about wars between nations had a human-scale focus, rather than looking at the largely meaningless flow of abstracted violence on sketchily-imagined battlefields.  What would we feel should we recall the experience of even one child orphaned by the Battle of New Orleans?  How might we act if we kept such a felt understanding close to heart?

Mythic archetypes provide a unique framework to make sense of the shifting passions and conflicted experiences of even the healthiest of lives.  Who has not felt the pangs of alienation endured by the Tzutujil Raggedy Boy, the comfort of the Lydian Bellerophon in his partnership with Pegasus, the exultation of the Indian Hanuman as he crested the parapets of Ravana’s fortress, or the sense of mystery and doom endured by the Thracian Orpheus in his descent into the Underworld?  But these are not the stories of our peoples.

Complementary to the good work of healing neglected wildlands, ailing urban and agricultural ecosystems, and communities removed by cultural illusion from their home lands, we permaculturalists must also pay some attention to the sphere of our communications.  A story told with thin heart and inconstant intention could lead to the collapse of a carefully designed garden though the ground be vibrant for a time.  I argue that those oral technologies we characterize as mythic are of great utility to us in this “work that reconnects”.  Here are some ways we might reintegrate myth into every-day communication, and begin to cultivate meaning in the ground of our exchanges:

1.  Learn stories by heart, and tell them frequently.

Many people have a born knack for telling tales.  Sometimes we say they have ‘the gift of the gab’, or we call them orators or writers.  Nurture these people, and goad them into loosening their word-hoards, that they might practice and excel, and that the audience might learn and be amused.  If you are one of these people with a latent storytelling ability, exercise it!  Learn stories by ear and by book, but where possible tell them from memory or by heart.  A story told from a book isn’t quite a story; there’s something incomplete about a tale held in rigid words formed by a personally unknown other.  Stories must be given the freedom to tell themselves through the body and voice of the skald.  Other people’s stories are good to know, better if they’ve been given to you directly by another story-teller.  The benefit of stories, and the point where entertainment becomes education and stories become myth, lies in the ability of the storyteller to bring them to wild life.  Tell dramatized versions of important dreams, tales of feats and mighty deeds by fellow community members or ancestors, characterized stories of the nonhumans in your neighborhood.  The timing and purpose of storytelling also affects the growing future of the local culture.  No matter how evocatively you tell them, stories told exclusively as entertainment lose some of their latent power.  Powerful myths must be treated as such, so as to properly impress their importance on the malleable minds of young audience-members, though this does not always mean a grave countenance is required for a strong tale.  Some stories gain power from their location at certain points in the geography of the landscape or the chonology of the year.  Most of the world’s oral traditions mix storytelling with song- something to keep in mind…  When we tell mythic stories we bring a little of the healing magic called ‘imagination’ into the world.

2.  Learn and draw upon the deep poetry of your own language.

I hope the point I’ve been trying to make with my endless lexicographical rambling has by now sunk in a bit: every word tells a story.  Learn a handful of Latin or Greek roots and watch in amazement as the world of scientific terminology opens up like a flower.  Dig deeper and familiarize yourself with some Indo-European phonemes, and the patterns that connect diverse branches on the tree of meaning shift into focus.  Research into wood roots has the added benefit of bringing your own cultural history to life, as questions emerge like, ‘why did this word change meanings at this time?’  Teach this richer form of the language to kids as an antidote to the acronym-ridden nonsense of the contemporary vernacular.  Biology teachers, environmental educators, coyote mentors, and other feral adults:  Ignore the advice of the otherwise excellent Coyote’s Guide; don’t trivialize binomial nomenclature.  Introduce ‘scientific names’ as mystical, magical, secret words that summon up the essence of the creature (Heliomaster constantii, the one mighty by the lord of the sun and constant in his ways, is way cooler than ‘plain-capped starthroat’).  Or, when you’re dealing with something inane like Toxostoma lecontei (LeConte’s arrow-mouth, or ‘LeConte’s thrasher’, as though the fact that entomologist John LeConte once saw one is the most memorable thing about these birds) you can always collectively come up with something more evocative for one or both portions of the name.  Just because a name is written one way in a book doesn’t mean that’s the only name worth using.

3.  Communicate with poetic excellence.

Use beautiful words frequently.  Pay some attention to rhyme and meter, especially in storytelling, teaching, writing, and any other activity that involves a few people speaking and many people listening.  Listening to expert storytellers and orators is a good way to gain some insight into what sorts of constructions work well.  Everyone has their own style though, so don’t get too hung up on imitating the greats.  Descriptive epithets, like the Norse and Old English kennings, are a great way to enrich communication and strengthen the bonds of community.  Calling an automobile ‘road-treader’ rather than ‘the white Subaru’ is a bit more meaningful, just as ‘Sally Frog-Catcher of the house of Martha Pie-Baker’ both sounds fantastic and evokes pride and good feeling, unlike the neutral ‘Sally Jenkins of 32 North Pine Street.’  Machines are anonymous and interchangeable, but we are living human creatures with lives rich in legendary experience- so, speak as though it were so!

4.  Make new words.

Once you have a familiarity with the basic structure of your language, you can mess about a bit, and fill in holes in your vocabulary.  Start from the roots up, so your new words have some connotative link to the rest of the language, and prefer onomatopoetic sounds to arbitrary ones, again for a stronger connotatively meaningful content.  Lewis Carroll was brilliant at this, though many of his ‘portmanteau words’ were regarded, by himself as much as by his contemporaries, as little more than nonsensical amusements.  As always, enthusiasm is no replacement for diligence, and an old word often remains, forgotten at the edge of the vernacular, that will do the job best.  As with honorifics, kennings can serve the purpose of neologisms quite well.  Play around with it, the more people playing the better.  Local food, local markets, and local currencies are all coming into vogue these days, why not local language?

5.  Speak from the heart.

Language loses meaning when lies are common.  Be quite clear about what you mean before you say it, even if that internal awareness is of a lack of personal clarity on the matter at hand.  I was once accused by a student of speaking “like a White Man- with forked tongue” after some rambling introduction in which I inflicted some idiotic standardized test on the class after vehemently protesting my dislike of such educational obstacles.  This would be an example of not meaning what one says; had I genuinely felt the test was not worth the time of my students, I would have found a way around it, or would have invited them to help in brainstorming some lateral solution to the dilemma of departmental authority.  In any event, we make our own realities through language, and its up to us whether or not to accept the realities of others, no matter what hierarchy they may belong to.  Words have power, and we steal away a little of that magic every time we use them inaccurately.  Much of the language we hear in the Westernized world carries intentions of strife and woe.  We live in a culture of euphemism and dysphemism, where the purpose of press releases, news ‘events’, advertising, and scholarly papers is more often than not to delude and dominate.  If we desire to live in a place where people communicate to enlighten, educate, empower, and aid, we must change our way of talking, and be more critical and less tolerant of untrue speech.

This last tenet, of speaking with intention, is far and away the most powerfully transformative of the lot, as it is the one every one of us can do.  It is also the most difficult, as it require us to know ourselves deeply, sometimes uncomfortably so, and to act from those deep places.  Attend to this deed of self-knowing, though, and your own mythology will coalesce even as the illusions of the dominating culture disperse.

The world of machines and endless highways, lit by bright halogen bulbs, the garbage dumps, clearcuts, sweatshops, and slums always somehow hidden in shadow, is undergirded by its own mythology.  On compulsion of a story are forests leveled and children enslaved; on the fragile strings of narrative does one man dance his life to the tune of another.  Our sacred wound, as a people, is a broken story somewhere at the core of what we have come to call the world.  It is a thin myth though, which tells of a man, always a man, pulling himself up by his own bootstraps to lie and steal and hurt without censure.  It’s the story that introduced this essay, but there are others…

‘And so it came to pass in the dark days of the strangers, that there arose among the people those who chafed beneath the yoke.  Within their hearts they felt not the hollowness of the Only True Way, but an echoing richness that seemed to emanate from the ruined forests and blasted hills.  Some remembered that they were not always strangers, but once had been people themselves.  These people were called Witch and Heretic, Kook and Unscientific, Pinko, Hippie, Punk, and Idealist.  Though they were sorely persecuted by the followers of the Only True Way, they persevered, living on in the house of the enemy.  They came to doubt the stories of the coming of the Only True Way, and began to remember a different history:

The strangers did indeed come to the land of the people in olden days, and they bore many strange gifts and veiled threats, but the people were not so easily swayed.  After much council, the fateful words were uttered, “You People Are Nuts.  Go Live Over There And Leave Us Alone.”  And for a time the strangers kept to their allotted lands, nursing their madness and building their strength in secret.  From time to time lone strangers would cross the land, remembering in their hearts that they were people once too.  They were welcomed by the people, and the snakes were combed from the hair of the exiles, and their backs were straightened.  It was whispered that the strangers reserved their direst tortures for those who turned their backs on the Only True Way, and many of the people-who-were-once-strangers were stolen away in the night, never to be heard from again.  As the strangers waxed strong they made terrible war on the people, taking what they desired and ruining what they took.  The people fought bravely, but the strangers were so fierce, their weapons so terrible that eventually all but the hardest hearted of warriors lay down their arms.  Better to risk the wages of bondage, to grieve for the dead and pay proper homage, than to lose oneself in battle-rage and be polluted by the madness of the enemy.  The people bowed their heads and wept for the loss of their finest, for the banishment of their guiding spirits, for their exile from their most-loved lands, for the gathering silence of the world around them.  The wisest and most gifted among them were dispatched in the cruelest ways imaginable by their conquerors.  Without their guidance, the youth of the people came to see the strangers as role models.  The children of the people aged, their minds and hearts twisted until they confused cruelty for justice, greed for virtue, brutality for love, and ignorance for wisdom.  Their hearts were scoured by unnamed sorrow, and in the vacuum where love for the world once dwelt unfurled a desperate faith in the Only True Way.

And the people who remembered shivered and shed tears for their waylaid ancestors.  They steeled their eyes and sharpened the blades of their tongues, and girt their voices in potent beauty.  The hardest hearted of them marched again to war, singing old bravery songs and visiting destruction on the machines of the strangers.  Others sang healing songs and combed the snakes from the hair of their fellows, and reminded them that they, too, were once people.  Some sang songs of earth and wood, renewing long-forgotten pacts with the spirits and creatures of the land.  Those most sensitive sang grieving songs to feed the hungry shades of too many generations lost to emptiness.  Some sang beauty songs, teaching songs, guiding songs, songs to light fires and songs to break steel, songs to welcome in the spring and songs to wake the mountains.  Many of the singers were cut down where they stood by strangers with stoppered ears and hearts in conflict, but where one song died, ten others rose in volume in its place.  The singing of the people grew in strength, joined now by harmonizing voices from sea and forest, rock and wind.  Building and building, resonating in the hearts of every people, the songs were streaming out across the land, and what they touched burst into life.  It was a dark time for strangers, one of hunger and chill; scarce were the flashing lights and buzzing machines, and loud were the songs of the world.  The songlines of the Only True Way fractured and unraveled, spinning melodious harmonies of reason and pragmatism, caution and care.  Where once were dead cities bloomed fragrant gardens.  From the ashen soil where grain lay in serried ranks grew verdant prairies, lush savannas.  Rivers loosed their bonds and rose in rich tumult over floodplains and deltas, waxing proud and wild.  The black clouds fled from the skies, and the springs again rose clear and sweet.  Where once was emptiness, the hearts of the people were filled with the life of the world.  The grandchildren of the people and the grandchildren of the strangers looked on the world, and on each other, and could not tell where one ended and the other began.  And they all lived happily ever after…’

Now we make it happen.