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SISTERS OF THE EARTH -- WOMEN'S PROSE & POETRY ABOUT NATURE |
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Our Kinship with Her: HOW WE ARE EMBEDDED IN NATURE Whenever I hear someone boast of having conquered a mountain by climbing it or a wild river by paddling it, I am struck by the foolishness of this attitude. It seems to me a pitiful bravado in the face of a great and powerful mystery, like whistling in the dark to give oneself courage. Worse, it arrogantly pits the ego against the matrix of being, conveying the harmful illusion that one creature can dominate the creation of which it is a part and on which it depends for its very life. How vastly healthier and more functional is the attitude expressed by the women whose writing is included in this section! To them, we are kin with nature, not adversaries or dominators or conquerors, and our kinship is worthy of celebration. Our kinship with nature can be realized in a number of different ways. Some of the writers in this section identify closely with a particular place, feeling its features to be part of their personal geography. Others write about a special attunement to the voices of nature. Still others experience kinship with nature in moments of mystical union with the larger fabric of life, including moments of birth and death, when our physical bond with the earth is perhaps most apparent. Harjo (born 1951) has written that a woman "has to go constantly outside of herself to find herself," and for Harjo, a member of the Muscogee Tribe of the Creek Nation, this often means turning to nature and the spirits that dwell there. Her poems and stories, influenced by both feminist thought and the oral tradition of her people, seek to name the dysfunction of what she calls the "overculture" and to remind us that we can still choose to walk in beauty and love. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and educated at the University of New Mexico (B.A.) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A.), Harjo has won numerous awards for her books of poetry and has taught at the University of Colorado, the University of Arizona, and the University of New Mexico. More recently, she has given voice to her Native American experience through the medium of music, playing the saxophone and reciting her poetry with her "tribal reggae blues" bands Poetic Justice and The Real Revolution (www.joyharjo.com). The following poem is from her 1978 collection What Moon Drove Me to This? FIRE a woman can't
survive look at me Valerie Andrews (born 1949) was prompted to begin writing A Passion for This Earth: Exploring a New Partnership of Man, Woman and Nature (1990), from which the following excerpt is taken, when she discovered in the course of editing a journal that her contemporaries suffered from the same sense of rootlessness and alienation from nature that she had been feeling. In the years following, she became engaged in "one long ritual of returning to the earth," as she married a landscape architect and environmental planner, moved with him to a stone farmhouse dating from 1790 in the Hudson River Valley, and sought ways to renew her kinship with nature. In the book, Andrews brings a perspective to the topic informed by her knowledge of literature, psychology, and spirituality, developed in the course of a career as a journalist and editor. In the 1990s, she worked with the psychologist and author Sam Keen on a series of video interviews about spiritual journeys, hosted the PBS television special "A Conversation with Thomas Moore," and was a featured commentator in a documentary on the role of mysticism in modern life entitled "A Still Small Voice." She founded Sacred Words: A Center for Healing Stories and continues to write on topics of health, psychology, and spirituality, while now living in Greenbrae, California. BEGINNING WITH A PLACE As a child I had a secret place. Every day at sunset I visited a grove of birch trees surrounded by a hedge of sweet-smelling privet. At the center was a mound where I would lie down and listen to the steady rhythmic heartbeat of the earth. For seven years I performed this daily ritual; even in winter I could feel this pulse as though I were connected by a rootlike umbilicus to the dark core of the land. The grove faced west and formed a kind of kiva or womblike container. This enclosure had all the power of an ancient shrine; it was a place of dying and becoming. As the light intensified and left the sky awash in crimson flames, I learned a way of being in the world and in transition. Something within me changed as the earth underwent its own transfiguration and as the day's activity gave way to the long, slow respiration of the night. This is how, at the beginning of my life, I received my teachings directly from the natural world. I understood the rhythm of existence through the interplay of light and shadow and the subtle changes of the air and climate. I learned that for every mood there is a corresponding season and that our lives are seamlessly connected to the great life of the earth. When I withdrew in winter and found myself in dark and inaccessible regions, I came to know that darkness is a time for the migration of the soul: I saw then what we hold in common with the roots and seeds -- a stage of mute and invisible growth. My inner changes and emotions were often triggered by the land: I would feel the breakthrough of the spring as the windswept sky and a sudden movement of the clouds brought forth a new round of activity. I would become like the hard, insistent shoots sprouting upward from the earth, and something in me would be heartened and encouraged as I stretched my spirit toward the light. The eruptions of the crocus and the daffodil still remind me that in the days ahead I will know the exhilaration of opening that belongs to the buds and flowers. By such observations, we discover that life is not static or fixed; one thing flows into the next, and we are standing in the midst of it wide-eyed and innocent. There is, and will forever be, a link between the guilelessness of childhood and the revelation of the land. This is what allows us to perceive the magic of creation. We remain under its spell until the onset of adulthood; then so often the bond is broken, the intimacy lost, as we surrender to a world of our own making, a world where everything is quantified and known. I believe that our souls are formed in the idleness of youth, and it is then, when our time is unstructured and unmeasured, that we know ourselves to be at one with the essential wisdom of the world. When I was seven, I roamed the hillsides and the meadows, aware that the world around me was engaged in an endless cycle of renewal. I went to my birch grove, certain that the land would accept all my loves and disappointments and receive my childhood joys and tragedies as it received all other living things. It was the earth that gave me my first sense of communion and ... I felt that my best, my truest self was connected to a few square miles of land. When I was twelve, my family moved from the country to the crowded suburbs of New Jersey, and I felt we had done the unforgiveable -- we had left behind the place that supported us and gave us everlasting life. There were no more rose bushes or rows of irises and hollyhocks. I could no longer pick apples from our yard or run down the road to get fresh eggs from the neighbor's farm. Years later, I realized that the land is always with us. The world as we first knew it remains imprinted on the body and the brain like tiny fossils embedded in a piece of shale. As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees. We are continually articulating the intelligence of the planet, which has grown up through all the species. The whole earth lives within us, and in every moment, we are both its creators and discoverers. We only need to reawaken all these early memories. The diary of Opal Whiteley (1897-1992), displaying a young girl's delight-filled attunement to nature, caused a sensation when it was first published in 1920 and has gone through a number of incarnations on its way to becoming an American classic. Born in Colton, Washington, Opal moved to Oregon with her logging family when she was four and wrote her diary when she was six and seven. As a teenager, she taught nature classes and gave lectures with such titles as "Nearer to the Heart of Nature" and "The Fairyland Around Us." She used the latter title for a children's book on nature that she self- published in 1918, financed by advance subscriptions. During a visit to the East Coast, she interested Ellery Sedgwick, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, in her diary, which had been torn up by a jealous sister. Painstakingly pieced back together, the diary was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly beginning in March 1920 and published that August as The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart. Although, the book was an immediate success, reviewed favorably in The New York Times and Life magazine, skeptics called it a hoax and hounded it out of print within a year. In the book, Opal claimed that she was actually the kidnapped daughter of a French prince, and after the book was discredited she traveled the world in her claimed fathers footsteps, eventually surfacing in 1948 in London. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, she was committed to Napsbury Hospital at St Albans, where she lived for more than forty years until her death. Opal's journal was rediscovered and published in free-verse form by Jane Boulton in 1976, and retrieved again by Benjamin Hoff, who published the journal with his own punctuation, paragraph dMsion, and chapter titles as The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow in 1986. The following excerpt is taken from the latter edition. The journal fell out of print again but experienced a resurgence of interest in the mid-1990s and is now available both online (http://intersect.uoregon.edu/opal) and in various editions aimed at different reading levels. An Opal Whiteley Memorial (http://www.efn.org/~opal) was founded in Cottage Grove, Oregon, in 1994. THE JOY-SONG OF NATURE Very early in the morning of today, I did get out of my bed and I did get dressed in a quick way Then I climbed out the window of the house we live in. The sun was up, and the birds were singing. I went my way. As I did go, I did have hearing of many voices -- they were the voices of earth, glad for the spring. They did say what they had to say in the growing grass, and in the leaves growing out from tips of branches. The birds did have knowing, and sang what the grasses and leaves did say of the gladness of living. I too did feel glad feels, from my toes to my curls. I went down by the swamp. I went there to get reeds. There I saw a black bird with red upon his wings. He was going in among the rushes. I made a stop to watch him. I have thinks tomorrow I must be going in among the rushes, where he did go. I shall pull off my shoes and stockings first, for mud is there, and there is water. I like to go in among the rushes where the black birds with red upon their wings do go. I like to touch fingertips with the rushes. I like to listen to the voices that whisper in the swamp. And I do so like to feel the mud ooze up between my toes. Mud has so much of interest in it -- slippery feels, and sometimes little seeds that someday will grow into plant-folk, if they do get the right chance. And some were so growing this morning, and more were making begins -- I did have seeing of them while I was looking looks about for reeds. With the reeds I did find there, I did go a-piping. I went adown the creek, and out across the field, and in along the lane. Every stump I did come to, I did climb upon.... Most every day, I do dance. I dance with the leaves and the grass. I feel thrills from my toes to my curls. I feel like a bird, sometimes. Then I spread my arms for wings, and I go my way from stump to stump, and on adown the hill. Sometimes I am a demoiselle, flitting near unto the water. Then I nod unto the willows, and they nod unto me. They wave their arms, and I wave mine. They wiggle their toes in the water a bit, and I do so, too. And every time we wiggle our toes, we do drink into our souls the song of the brook -- the glad song it is always singing. And the joy-song does sing on in our hearts. So did it today. In her work as a healer and as a writer of poetry; novels, plays, and nonfiction, Deena Metzger (born 1936) has focused on the healing power of stories (www.deenametzger.com). A deep feeling of kinship with all beings is a taproot of her work, as is an emphasis on the importance of community and making connections between mind, body, spirit, and nature. Along with Brenda Peterson and Linda Hogan, she edited Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (1998). In The Axis Mundi Poems (1981), from which the following poem is taken, she explores the mysterious subterranean intertwining of humans with other life forms, particularly trees. A close identification with trees figures prominently in other creations of hers, as well. Her 1978 journal of her struggle with breast cancer was published as a book entitled Tree (1981). "On the book of my body, I have permanently inscribed a tree," reads a line of her verse on a poster that has inspired thousands of women -- a poster bearing a photograph of her nude upper torso, arms ecstatically outstretched, tattoo of a branch and its green leaves covering her mastectomy scar. Her most recent book is Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing (2002). She has two sons, is married to the writer/healer Michael Ortiz Hill, and lives with wolves at the end of the road in Topanga, California. THE FIRST ROOTS CREEP UP* I am learning to
come upon the tree, slowly, to surprise it I'm the same as
the tree, as soil. Eve and her muddy body. Perhaps I was a
clay jug. Perhaps I will be one again. What differences
between trees and beakers? Each is * Title from "Saprophyte" by Sam Hamill in The Book of Elegiac Geography Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a folklorist who preserved tales of black life in the rural South in anthropological works and fiction. Born in Notasulga, Alabama, and raised in Eatonville, Florida, she earned art associate degree from Howard University and graduated from Barnard College in anthropology. In the early 1950s, after publishing seven books -- four novels, two collections of folklore, and an autobiography -- and numerous shorter pieces, Hurston was the hest-known black woman writer in America, but she later lapsed into obscurity as a result of her politics. She was buried in an unmarked grave in a segregated cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, and her work was only rediscovered when Alice Walker published "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in Ms. magazine in March 1975. Her classic Their Eyes Were watching God (1937), written in seven weeks while living in Haiti, was the first African-American novel to be explicitly feminist. It follows the awakening and blossoming of Janie Crawford, foreshadowed by the blooming of the pear tree that grows in the yard of her grandmother's log cabin. BLOSSOMING PEAR TREE It was a spring afternoon in west Florida. Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the backyard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness. She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. After a while she got up from where she was and went over the little garden field entire. She was seeking confirmation of the voice and vision, and everywhere she found and acknowledged answers. A personal answer for all other creations except herself. She felt an answer seeking her, but where? When? How? She found herself at the kitchen door and stumbled inside. In the air of the room were flies tumbling and singing, marrying and giving in marriage. When she reached the narrow hallway she was reminded that her grandmother was home with a sick headache. She was lying across the bed asleep so Janie tipped on out of the front door. Oh to be a pear tree -- any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her? Nothing on the place nor in her grandma's house answered her. She searched as much of the world as she could from the top of the front steps and then went on down to the front gate and leaned over to gaze up and down the road. Looking, waiting, breathing short with impatience. Waiting for the world to be made. Lucille Clifton (born 1936) is a writer whose spare but emotionally powerful poems in the black idiom express a sense of her roots in earth, family, and religious tradition. "The proper subject matter for poetry is life," she asserts. Clifton was born in Depew, New York, and attended Howard University and Fredonia State Teachers College. The mother of six children, she has written numerous books, for children and nearly a dozen volumes of poetry, and has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has served as Poet Laureate of Maryland and taught at universities across the country; most recently as Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland. She lives in Columbia, Maryland. The following poem is from Good woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987). BREAKLIGHT light keeps on
breaking. Brenda Peterson (born 1950) writes "ecological stories" (as she prefers to call her prose pieces) that reflect a spirit-infused vision of a mothering universe. Mentored by the waters of Puget Sound (where she has lived for more than two decades), by dolphins, by Taoism, Goddess religions, and Native American spirituality, and by other women, she believes the earth is alive and animals are brothers and sisters. The daughter of a U.S. Forest Service employee who eventually became head of the Forest Service, Peterson spent the first seven years of her life in an isolated cabin in the Sierra Nevada of northern California. After earning a B.A. in English and comparative literature at the University of California at Davis, she worked at a number of different jobs across the country and published two novels before consciously committing herself to nature writing. Living by Water: Essays on Life, Land, and Spirit (1990), from which the following selection is taken, began to earn Peterson (www.literati.net/Peterson) a reputation for envisioning nature, animals, and spirit in a relational way that might enable healing of broken hands. Subsequent books -- including a memoir, Build Me an Ark: A Life with Animals (2001), and a collaboration with Linda Hogan, Sightings: The Gray Whales' Mysterious Journey (2002) -- have expanded her vision. She has also collaborated with Hogan on editing a series of three anthologies, about women and animals (edited by Deena Metzger as well), women and plants, and women and God. BELIEVING THE BOND Midnight, full early June moon. I'm walking my backyard beach, bare feet slapping wet sand, then sucked in if I stand still -- which I do to stare at this amazing moon. It woke me with its strong, insistent light, shining into the living room where I'd fallen asleep on the couch, cat draped around my bead like a Davy Crockett hat. I walk carefully on the dark beach to avoid cutting my feet on black mussels and barnacles and because my housemate and her husband are sleeping on the seawall. It is low tide, a minus 3.2 feet that had us scuttling all day to dig butter clams and a geoduck I threw back because as it spat its last grit in the bucket, I swear I heard the misshapen creature screaming for the sea. We tell ourselves we are in heaven in this house, here our first summer on Puget Sound. As I walk the midnight beach in bright moonlight, I feel full and illumined as the moon itself. This is a night I will remember on my deathbed -- the stillness, the shining, the water shushing. Now it happens: a shift in the sand, a trembling in my feet that shudders up my legs and swirls in my belly like radiant heat. Then deep, rhythmic jolts of electricity as if I'm plugged into a hidden socket by a vibrating cord. Surge after surge of energy flows up through my body moving with the waves. Struck by lightning! I think though there is no storm, no flash, except the sudden splash of phosphorous gleaming against me. Hands on the Earth, that's what I was taught. When lightning strikes, bend double and ground yourself by planting hands flat on the Earth; then you're like a small human rainbow, electricity running from Earth through your body and back to Earth. Because you connect, you survive the shock. I plunge my hands into the Sound, palms flat against the grainy, falling-away sand. Feet and hands on the sea bottom, I let the pulses pass through me. I've never felt anything like this before. And yet it is familiar. I am afraid it will overwhelm me and my body will be blown out like an insignificant throwaway fuse by this electricity. Bent double, my whole body shakes with the force of the pulse and at last I recognize its source. Not the moon, not the sky, not an electric storm, but the Earth herself. I close my eyes and unclench my jaw, letting the blood rush to my head. My hands are numb from the cold Sound, but they tingle with electricity. My teeth begin chattering and I say silently, Please, it's enough! and suddenly the current stops. Unsteadily I stand, my palms indented with tiny seashells that adorn my skin like barnacles. Never again will this Earth feel the same to me. I remember now that I live on a vibrant, breathing being that is a greater body encompassing mine. Images come to mind from a childhood story -- an Indian girl plays atop the round, hard shell of a tortoise that is really the whole world. One day the turtle wakes up, pokes out its sleepy head, and spots the little girl on its big back. Will the great tortoise shake her off like a parasite or let the girl continue to live on top of it? They make a simple bargain: the girl can stay on the tortoise's sturdy, round back if the girl will always remember to sing to the turtle as it sleeps. If the singing stops, so does the symbiosis. My father, himself part Seminole, French Canadian, and Cherokee Indian, told me this story when I was very small. He also taught me the earth was alive. while I understood this with my mind, my body had forgotten the startling physical evidence of this living planet. Perhaps I forgot because it had been too long since I'd put my hands on the Earth and listened. When I first learned to crawl, my hands moved along earth. I was born high in the Sierra Nevadas on a Forest Service ranger station. It was here in a small cabin I spent my early years. Wilderness was not someplace we visited, it was our home. When I crawled, I bellied my way along like a blind girl. What good was just seeing when you were crawling in spring grasses, eye- level with poppies, Indian paintbrush, and snakes? Better to use sound, smell, and touch to navigate the forest floor where pine needles and sharp-scented cones stuck in your palms, where flaming fall leaves crackled between your small fingers, and your hand perfectly fit into a mole's hideout or a squirrel's knothole home. Before I could name or objectify the forest, it lived in my hands. Before I had siblings or playmates, I chatted with stones and gossiping grasshoppers. My father called me "gopher," or "coon-baby," because of the mysterious dark rings circling my eyes for my first two years. They faded; the animal names did not. My father's forestry work drew deeply on his Ozarkian farmboy skills. He knew trees the way some people do finances or racehorses; he called them by name as if they were simply a tribe of very tall, silent neighbors who had their own ways. What he did not know was babies, and so he and my young, distracted mother raised me like the animals my father knew so well. If I cried, I was a coyote: if I sang, a mockingbird. And when I was the most inconsolable, my father suggested I hold on to a tree. Many of my earliest memories are of wrapping my arms as far as they would reach around a ponderosa pine, my face buried and crisscrossed with the rough imprint of its bark. The tree took the tears from me, transforming them into sweet- smelling sap I could chew like a child's cud. I hardly knew I was human until we left the forest. And then even though I later made my living in my father's footsteps as an environmental writer and editor and exchanged the wilderness of my first forest for the wildness of living by water, I forgot what the Earth feels like until this night so many summers later when I placed my hands back on the ground and remembered my first mother. That summer night on Puget Sound, I considered another birth. It was a conscious connection, as if I, like that tortoise, simply woke up. And because it happened on Puget Sound's generous beach, I began to believe this body of water was another mother. My first love of the Sierra breezes through pines was transformed into the wash of waves, my original longing for the stalwart company of trees was changed into a fascination with the more fluid and secret life of the Sound. A highly acclaimed writer of poetry and fiction that blends the mystical and the natural, Louise Erdrich (born 1954) has commented that fiction "can spur us to treat the earth, in which we abide and which harbors us, as we would treat our own mothers and fathers." Erdrich was born the first of seven children of a German father and a French-Ojibwe mother in Little Falls, Minnesota, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her parents taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. She began to awaken to the meaning of her Ojibwe heritage when she took a class in Native American studies from Michael Dorris during her junior year at Dartmouth. After earning an M.A. in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, she married Dorris and published a book of poetry, then expanded into short stories and later into novels at her husband's suggestion. She wrote The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (1995), her first work of nonfiction and the source of the following selection, during the period when she and Dorris lived in rural New Hampshire and she bore their three daughters. Since Dorris's suicide in 1997, Erdrich has continued to add to the series of novels begun with Love Medicine (1984) that are set on a fictional Ojibwe reservation and follow the interlocking lives of several generations, has written children's books, and has borne a fourth daughter. She now lives with her daughters in Minneapolis, where in 2000 she opened Birchbark Books, specializing in Native American books and products. In the light of a shaded lamp, gold light, in the sighing of the pond through the screen, I am waiting for the night to close over me with its muscle of rain. The sky opens, the black water pours from the leaves just beyond the torn grass of the yard. For an hour there is only the sound of water. And then, when the rain stops, I am visited by a spirit. She drifts toward the lighted screen, powerful and chaste, her great wings whirring like a child's toy, her thick body a pale wedge of velvet. I turn out the light, and she is gone into the liquid swell of darkness. With a sound like stiff paper rattling, she rises over the roof, whiter, whiter, into the trees. She returns. The next day when I sit down to work before my windows, she clings to the screen just at eye level. Her thick green fairy wings fan the small breeze. Each wing bears an eye lined in black, a washed blue iris, a staring eye like the evil eye charms above the lintels of Creek houses. She is molten green, each wing edged as though in delicate dried blood. She is there all that whole day and there, too, the next morning when I sit down. Her wings are thinner now, rubbed to membranes, the edges torn and eroded. Her great golden fish-spines of antennae tremble. She will live for a week, mouthless, a being with one clear purpose. All of this ethereal complexity exists to mate and lay eggs, of course. I pity her for a moment and then I don't want to think about her anymore. She's very troublesome! She is a function of her species life cycle. I put down my pen. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sex is the apparition, the engine, the driven inner workings of all that shines and breathes. The need to write and to reproduce are both all-absorbing tasks that attempt to partake of the future. Dim wings will close over our conniving brains no matter what and so we lose ourselves most happily in tasks that partake of the eternal. And once we realize that nothing really does, anything can -- pulling weeds, picking apples, putting children to bed. I make a hieroglyph of my desires, assign grand meanings to my wishes, yet I'm miserably aware it's all brain chemicals, moth pheromones, cravings that can be undone with more ease than I would like to allow. Why learn French, I question the moth. The memory of tricky irregular conjugations will one day deconcatenate into meaningless biochemical structures. Consumed by fire, set free to roam the capillary-fed composting network of all life, they will impress no husband, infuriate no Parisian shopkeeper. The sexuality of spring reminds me too closely of the old futilities. The crickets and grasshoppers, sawing away with leg fiddles -- wooing. The frogs, distinguishing razor-sharp whines from bull bellows -- desperate. Each night, the fireflies flash out a Morse code of desire. I will not read it. I know in my heart the message. I know the end result of this dance of brutal fascinations, this love riot. Mallards. Luna moths. I pay a sort of homage to this creature by watching her bathe her short life away in sunlight. I walk outside and stand behind her. I stretch my finger to the tufts of velvet on her back, look into her dark unknowing eyes. At my slightest touch, she arches. Her wings are strong and heavy as a bird's, and the fluted green tail quivers in such sudden strain that I clap my hands away as though burned. Ofelia Zepeda (born 1952) has devoted herself to studying and preserving the language of her tribe, the Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago) of Arizona, as well as other American Indian languages, and to writing poems in her native language, Born and raised in the rural cotton-farming community of Stanfield, Arizona, she earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Arizona, where she now teaches in the Departments of Linguistics and American Indian Studies. As a graduate student, she authored the first grammar of the Tohono O'odham language. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grunt, Zepeda has published two books of poetry, has contributed to several collections of Native American literature, and serves as editor of the Sun Tracks series published by the University of Arizona Press. Her poem "The South Corner," from Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (1995), acknowledges the pull that the light of the sun exerts on her and other animals as winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, arrives. THE SOUTH CORNER My body is in
line. I come into
balance. Profoundly rooted in the soil of southern Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was born, raised, and died in the same pre- revolutionary house in South Berwick. As a young girl, she often accompanied her father, a country doctor, on house calls, learning from him a sensitive appreciation of nature and literature. Her regional novels and short stories portray characters whose identification with the landscape of rural New England is as complete as was her own. Jewett's best-known work is The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a series of loosely connected sketches about life in a declining Maine seacoast town that features a number of women characters with complex, intimate relationships to the natural world. Like Mabel Osgood Wright and Celia Laighton Thaxter (both of whom are also represented in this volume), Jewett became caught up in the bird conservation movement of the late nineteenth century, crusading against the slaughter of birds for women's hats. "A White Heron," one of her most beloved short stories, collected in A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), springs from this concern. A WHITE HERON I The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o'clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. They were going away from the western light, and striking deep into the dark woods, but their feet were familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not. There was hardly a night the summer through when the old cow could be found waiting at the pasture bars; on the contrary, it was her greatest pleasure to hide herself away among the high huckleberry bushes, and though she wore a loud bell she had made the discovery that if one stood perfectly still it would not ring. So Sylvia had to hunt for her until she found her, and call Co'! Co'! with never an answering Moo, until her childish patience was quite spent. If the creature had not given good milk and plenty of it, the case would have seemed very different to her owners. Besides, Sylvia had all the time there was, and very little use to make of it. Sometimes in pleasant weather it was a consolation to look upon the cow's pranks as an intelligent attempt to play hide and seek, and as the child had no playmates she lent herself to this amusement with a good deal of zest. Though this chase had been so long that the wary animal herself had given an unusual signal of her whereabouts, Sylvia had only laughed when she came upon Mistress Moolly at the swamp-side, and urged her affectionately homeward with a twig of birch leaves. The old cow was not inclined to wander farther, she even turned in the right direction for once as they left the pasture, and stepped along the road at a good pace. She was quite ready to he milked now, and seldom stopped to browse. Sylvia wondered what her grandmother would say because they were so late. It was a great while since she had left home at half past five o'clock, but everybody knew the difficulty of making this errand a short one. Mrs. Tilley had chased the horned torment too many summer evenings herself to blame anyone else for lingering, and was only thankful as she waited that she had Sylvia, nowadays, to give such valuable assistance. The good woman suspected that Sylvia loitered occasionally on her own account; there never was such a child for straying out-of-doors since the world was made! Everybody said that it was a good change for a little maid who had tried to grow for eight years in a crowded manufacturing town, but, as for Sylvia herself, it seemed as if she never had been alive at all before she came to live at the farm. She thought often with wistful compassion of a wretched dry geranium that belonged to a town neighbor. "'Afraid of folks.''' old Mrs. Tilley said to herself, with a smile, after she had made the unlikely choice of Sylvia from her daughter's houseful of children, and was returning to the farm. "'Afraid of folks,' they said! I guess she won't be troubled no great with 'em up to the old place!" When they reached the door of the lonely house and stopped to unlock it, and the cat came to purr loudly, and rub against them, a deserted pussy, indeed, but fat with young robins, Sylvia whispered that this was a beautiful place to live in, and she never should wish to go home. The companions followed the shady wood-road, the cow taking slow steps, and the child very fast ones. The cow stopped long at the brook to drink, as if the pasture were not half a swamp, and Sylvia stood still and waited, letting her bare feet cool themselves in the shoal water, while the great twilight moths struck softly against her. She waded on through the brook as the cow moved away, and listened to the thrushes with a heart that beat fast with pleasure. There was a stirring in the great boughs overhead. They were full of little birds and beasts that seemed to be wide-awake, and going about their world, or else saying goodnight to each other in sleepy twitters. Sylvia herself felt sleepy as she walked along. However, it was not much farther to the house, and the air was soft and sweet. She was not often in the woods so late as this, and it made her feel as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the moving leaves, She was just thinking how long it seemed since she first came to the farm a year ago, and wondering if everything went on in the noisy town just the same as when she was there; the thought of the great red-faced boy who used to chase and frighten her made her hurry along the path to escape from the shadow of the trees. Suddenly this little woods-girl is horror-stricken to hear a clear whistle not very far away. Not a bird's whistle, which would have a sort of friendliness, but a boy's whistle, determined, and somewhat aggressive. Sylvia left the cow to whatever sad fate might await her, and stepped discreetly aside into the bushes, but she was just too late, The enemy had discovered her, and called out in a very cheerful and persuasive tone, "Halloa, little girl, how far is it to the road?" and trembling Sylvia answered almost inaudibly, "A good ways." She did not dare to look boldly at the tall young man, who carried a gun over his shoulder, but she came out of her bush and again followed the cow, while he walked alongside. "I have been hunting for some birds," the stranger said kindly, "and I have lost my way, and need a friend very much. Don't be afraid," he added gallantly. "Speak up and tell me what your name is, and whether you think I can spend the night at your house, and go out gunning early in the morning." Sylvia was more alarmed than before, would not her grandmother consider her much to blame? But who could have foreseen such an accident as this? It did not appear to be her fault, and she hung her head as if the stem of it were broken, but managed to answer "Sylvy," with much effort when her companion again asked her name. Mrs. Tilley was standing in the doorway when the trio came into view. The cow gave a loud moo by way of explanation. "Yes, you'd better speak up for yourself, you old trial! Where'd she tuck herself away this time, Sylvy?" Sylvia kept an awed silence; she knew by instinct that her grandmother did not comprehend the gravity of the situation. She must be mistaking the stranger for one of the farmer-lads of the region. The young man stood his gun beside the door, and dropped a heavy game-bag beside it; then he bade Mrs. Tilley good- evening, and repeated his wayfarer's story, and asked if he could have a night's lodging. "Put me anywhere you like," he said. "I must be off early in the morning, before day; but I am very hungry, indeed. You can give me some milk at any rate, that's plain." "Dear sakes, yes," responded the hostess, whose long slumbering hospitality seemed to be easily awakened. "You might fare better if you went out on the main road a mile or so, but you're welcome to what we've got. I'll milk right off, and you make yourself at home. You can sleep on husks or feathers," she proffered graciously. "I raised them all myself. There's good pasturing for geese just below here towards the ma'sh. Now step round and set a plate for the gentleman, Sylvy!" and Sylvia promptly stepped. She was glad to have something to do, and she was hungry herself. It was a surprise to find so clean and comfortable a little dwelling in this New England wilderness. The young man had known the horrors of its most primitive housekeeping, and the dreary squalor of that level of society which does not rebel at the companionship of hens. This was the best thrift of an old-fashioned farmstead, though on such a small scale it seemed like a hermitage. He listened eagerly to the old woman's quaint talk, he watched Sylvia's pale face and shining gray eyes with ever growing enthusiasm, and insisted that this was the best supper he had eaten for a month, then, afterward, the new-made friends sat down in the doorway together while the moon came up. Soon it would be berry-time, and Sylvia was a great help at picking. The cow was a good milker, though a plaguy thing to keep track of, the hostess gossiped frankly, adding presently that she had buried four children, so that Sylvia's mother, and a son (who might be dead) in California were all the children she had left. "Dan, my boy, was a great hand to go gunning," she explained sadly. "I never wanted for pa'tridges or gray squer'ls while he was to home. He's been a great wand'rer, I expect, and he's no hand to write letters. There, I don't blame him, I'd ha' seen the world myself if it had been so I could. "Sylvia takes after him," the grandmother continued affectionately, after a minute's pause. "There ain't a foot o' ground she don't know her way over, and the wild creatur's counts her one o' themselves. Squer'ls she'll tame to come an' feed right out o' her hands, and all sorts o' birds. Last winter she got the jay-birds to bangeing here, and I believe she'd 'a' scanted herself of her own meals to have plenty to throw out amongst 'em, if I hadn't kep' watch. Anything but crows, I tell her, I'm willin' to help support, -- though Dan he went an' tamed one o' them that did seem to have reason same as folks. It was round here a good spell after he went away. Dan an' his father they didn't hitch, -- but he never held up his head ag'in after Dan had dared him an' gone off." The guest did not notice this hint of family sorrows in his eager interest in something else. "So Sylvy knows all about birds, does she?" he exclaimed, as he looked round at the little girl who sat, very demure but increasingly sleepy, in the moonlight. "I am making a collection of birds myself. I have been at it ever since I was a boy." (Mrs. Tilley smiled.) "There are two or three very rare ones I have been hunting for these five years. I mean to get them on my own ground if they can be found." "Do you cage 'em up?" asked Mrs. Tilley doubtfully, in response to this enthusiastic announcement. "Oh, no, they're stuffed and preserved, dozens and dozens of them," said the ornithologist, "and I have shot or snared every one myself. I caught a glimpse of a white heron three miles from here on Saturday, and I have followed it in this direction. They have never been found in this district at all. The little white heron, it is," and he turned again to look at Sylvia with the hope of discovering that the rare bird was one of her acquaintances. But Sylvia was watching a hop-toad in the narrow footpath. "You would know the heron if you saw it," the stranger continued eagerly. "A queer tall white bird with soft feathers and long thin legs. And it would have a nest perhaps in the top of a high tree, made of sticks, something like a hawk's nest." Sylvia's heart gave a wild beat; she knew that strange white bird, and had once stolen softly near where it stood in some bright green swamp grass, away over at the other side of the woods. There was an open place where the sunshine always seemed strangely yellow and hot, where tall, nodding rushes grew, and her grandmother had warned her that she might sink in the soft black mud underneath and never be heard of more. Not far beyond were the salt marshes and beyond those was the sea, the sea which Sylvia wondered and dreamed about but never had looked upon, though its great voice could often be heard above the noise of the woods on stormy nights. "I can't think of anything I should like so much as to find that heron's nest," the handsome stranger was saying. "I would give ten dollars to anybody who could show it to me," he added desperately, "and I mean to spend my whole vacation hunting for it if need be. Perhaps it was only migrating, or had been chased out of its own region by some bird of prey." Mrs. Tilley gave amazed attention to all this, but Sylvia still watched the toad, not divining, as she might have done at some calmer time, that the creature wished to get to its hole under the doorstep, and was much hindered by the unusual spectators at that hour of the evening. No amount of thought, that night, could decide how many wished-for treasures the ten dollars, so lightly spoken of, would buy. The next day the young sportsman hovered about the woods, and Sylvia kept him company, having lost her first fear of the friendly lad, who proved to be most kind and sympathetic. He told her many things about the birds and what they knew and where they lived and what they did with themselves. And he gave her a jack-knife, which she thought as great a treasure as if she were a desert-islander. All day long he did not once make her troubled or afraid except when he brought down some unsuspecting singing creature from its bough. Sylvia would have liked him vastly better without his gun; she could not understand why he killed the very birds he seemed to like so much. But as the day waned, Sylvia still watched the young man with loving admiration. She had never seen anybody so charming and delightful; the woman's heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a dream of love. Some premonition of that great power stirred and swayed these young foresters who traversed the solemn woodlands with soft-footed silent care. They stopped to listen to a bird's song; they pressed forward again eagerly, parting the branches, speaking to each other rarely and in whispers; the young man going first and Sylvia following, fascinated, a few steps behind, with her gray eyes dark with excitement. She grieved because the longed-for white heron was elusive, but she did not lead the guest, she only followed, and there was no such thing as speaking first. The sound of her own unquestioned voice would have terrified her, -- it was hard enough to answer yes or no when there was need of that. At last evening began to fall, and they drove the cow home together, and Sylvia smiled with pleasure when they came to the place where she heard the whistle and was afraid only the night before. II Half a mile from home, at the farther edge of the woods, where the land was highest, a great pine-tree stood, the last of its generation, whether it was left for a boundary mark, or for what reason, no one could say; the woodchoppers who had felled its mates were dead and gone long ago, and a whole forest of sturdy trees, pines and oaks and maples, had grown again. But the stately head of this old pine towered above them all and made a landmark for sea and shore miles and miles away. Sylvia knew it well. She had always believed that whoever climbed to the top of it could see the ocean; and the little girl had often laid her hand on the great rough trunk and looked up wistfully at those dark boughs that the wind always stirred, no matter how hot and still the air might be below. Now she thought of the tree with a new excitement, for why, if one climbed it at break of day, could not one see all the world, and easily discover whence the white heron flew, and mark the place, and find the hidden nest? What a spirit of adventure, what wild ambition! What fancied triumph and delight and glory for the later morning when she could make known the secret! It was almost too real and too great for the childish heart to bear. All night the door of the little house stood open, and the whippoorwills came and sang upon the very step. The young sportsman and his old hostess were sound asleep, but Sylvia's great design kept her broad awake and watching. She forgot to think of sleep. The short summer night seemed as long as the winter darkness, and at last when the whippoorwills ceased, and she was afraid the morning would after all come too soon, she stole out of the house and followed the pasture path through the woods, hastening toward the open ground beyond, listening with a sense of comfort and companionship to the drowsy twitter of a half-awakened bird, whose perch she had jarred in passing. Alas, if the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep away the satisfaction of an existence heart to heart with nature and the dumb life of the forest! There was the huge tree asleep yet in the paling moonlight, and small and hopeful Sylvia began with utmost bravery to mount to the top of it, with tingling, eager blood coursing the channels of her whole frame, with her bare feet and fingers, that pinched and held like bird's claws to the monstrous ladder reaching up, up, almost to the sky itself. First she must mount the white oak tree that grew alongside, where she was almost lost among the dark branches and the green leaves heavy and wet with dew; a bird fluttered off its nest, and a red squirrel ran to and fro and scolded pettishly at the harmless housebreaker. Sylvia felt her way easily. She had often climbed there, and knew that higher still one of the oak's upper branches chafed against the pine trunk, just where its lower boughs were set close together. There, when she made the dangerous pass from one tree to the other, the great enterprise would really begin. She crept out along the swaying oak limb at last, and took the daring step across into the old pine-tree. The way was harder than she thought; she must reach far and hold fast, the sharp dry twigs caught and held her and scratched her like angry talons, the pitch made her thin little fingers clumsy and stiff as she went round and round the tree's great stem, higher and higher upward. The sparrows and robins in the woods below were beginning to wake and twitter to the dawn, yet it seemed much lighter there aloft in the pine-tree, and the child knew that she must hurry if her project were to be of any use. The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and farther upward. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit creeping and climbing from higher branch to branch. Who knows how steadily the least twigs held themselves to advantage this light, weak creature on her way! The old pine must have loved his new dependent. More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet-voiced thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child. And the tree stood still and held away the winds that June morning while the dawn grew bright in the east. Sylvia's face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground, when the last thorny bough was past, and she stood trembling and tired but wholly triumphant, high in the tree-top. Yes, there was the sea with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it, and toward that glorious east flew two hawks with slow-moving pinions. How low they looked in the air from that height when before one had only seen them far up, and dark against the blue sky. Their gay feathers were as soft as moths; they seemed only a little way from the tree, and Sylvia felt as if she too could go flying away among the clouds. Westward, the woodlands and farms reached miles and miles into the distance; here and there were church steeples, and white villages; truly it was a vast and awesome world. The birds sang louder and louder. At last the sun came up bewilderingly bright. Sylvia could see the white sails of ships out at sea, and the clouds that were purple and rose-colored and yellow at first began to fade away. Where was the white heron's nest in the sea of green branches, and was this wonderful sight and pageant of the world the only reward for having climbed to such a giddy height? Now look down again, Sylvia, where the green marsh is set among the shining birches and dark hemlocks; there where you saw the white heron once you will see him again; look, look! a white spot of him like a single floating feather comes up from the dead hemlock and grows larger, and rises, and comes close at last, and goes by the landmark pine with steady sweep of wing and outstretched slender neck and crested head. And wait! wait! do not move a foot or a finger, little girl, do not send an arrow of light and consciousness from your two eager eyes, for the heron has perched on a pine bough not far beyond yours, and cries back to his mate on the nest, and plumes his feathers for the new day! The child gives a long sigh a minute later when a company of shouting cat-birds comes also to the tree, and vexed by their fluttering and lawlessness the solemn heron goes away. She knows his secret now, the wild, light, slender bird that floats and wavers, and goes back like an arrow presently to his home in the green world beneath. Then Sylvia, well satisfied, makes her perilous way down again, not daring to look far below the branch she stands on, ready to cry sometimes because her fingers ache and her lamed feet slip, wondering over and over again what the stranger would say to her, and what he would think when she told him how to find his way straight to the heron's nest. *** "Sylvy, Sylvy!" called the busy old grandmother again and again, but nobody answered, and the small husk bed was empty, and Sylvia had disappeared. The guest waked from a dream, and remembering his day's pleasure hurried to dress himself that it might sooner begin. He was sure from the way the shy little girl looked once or twice yesterday that she had at least seen the white heron, and now she must really be persuaded to tell. Here she comes now, paler than ever, and her worn old frock is torn and tattered, and smeared with pine pitch. The grandmother and the sportsman stand in the door together and question her, and the splendid moment has come to speak of the dead hemlock-tree by the green marsh. But Sylvia does not speak after all, though the old grandmother fretfully rebukes her, and the young man's kind appealing eyes are looking straight into her own. He can make them rich with money; he has promised it, and they are poor now. He is so well worth making happy, and he waits to hear the story she can tell. No, she must keep silence! What is it that suddenly forbids her and makes her dumb? Has she been nine years growing, and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird's sake? The murmur of the pine's green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron's secret and give its life away. *** Dear loyalty, that suffered a sharp pang as the guest went away disappointed later in the day, that could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog loves! Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home with the loitering cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the piteous sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood. Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been, -- who can tell? Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summertime, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child! Margaret Hasse (born 1950) draws on her midwestern roots in her two published collections of poems, Stars Above, Stars Below (1984) -- source of the following poem -- and In a Sheep's Eye, Darling (1988). Born in South Dakota, she received a B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from the University of Minnesota. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she has taught creative writing courses and is now self-employed as a consultant to arts organizations. Her more recent poems appear in the book Thirty-three Minnesota Poets (2001) and such journals as WaterStone and The Midwest Quarterly. BEING STILL She's a quiet
clapper in the bell of the prairie, When she returns
to her parents' house, They allow her a
silent manner. Sally Carrighar (1898-1985) found her vocation in nature writing only after trying and abandoning various other artistic careers, and she eventually found a sense of belonging in wilderness that she did not find in human society. Born Dorothy Wagner in Cleveland, Ohio, she endured a difficult childhood and attended Wellesley College before taking a series of disillusioning jobs that led her to the brink of suicide. It was while recuperating from depression in her San Francisco apartment that she discovered a special rapport with the birds that came to feed at her windowsill and a mouse living in her radio, and in a flash realized that she could write about wildlife. At thirty-nine she set out to educate herself about animal behavior through library research, interviews with field biologists, and her own observations. She wrote six nature books, starting with One Day on Beetle Rock (1944) and One Day at Teton Marsh (1947), notable for their emphasis on individual animals and how it feels to live as they do. The seeds of her intimate feeling for wildlife were perhaps planted by the experience of summering on a Canadian island that she describes in the following excerpt from her autobiography, Home to the Wilderness (1973). HOME TO THE WILDERNESS As amazing as miracles was a morning in June the year that was fifteen and woke up in a tent on an island in Canada. We had arrived by lake steamer the previous night and, tired after the long trip from Kansas City, had gone straight to bed. Now it was daylight. I got up quickly, quietly and slipped out to see this new world. The tent was a short way back from the shore with a path leading down to a little dock. I walked to the end of it. Ripples were gently rearranging the pebbles along the beach but the lake was smooth. Its wide and beautiful surface, delicate silver- blue, steamed with a mist that disappeared as I watched, for the light of the early sun, splintering on the tops of the mainland evergreen trees, was starting to fall on the mist and dissolve it. Curiously, the lake's level surface seemed to be moving in alternate glassy streams, right and left, an effect that sometimes occurs on quiet water, I don't know why. The bay in front of the dock was framed by the shores of the mainland, which curved together from both sides to meet in a point. At that vertex another island, rocky and tall, rose from the water. It looked uninhabited; and although a few cabins were scattered along the mainland, between and behind them was unbroken forest. It was my first sight of a natural wilderness. Behind our tent too, and several other tents here and a house in their midst, was the forest. Over everything, as pervasive as sunshine, was the fragrance of balsam firs. It was aromatic and sweet and I closed my eyes and breathed deeply to draw in more of it. Voices from some of the tents meant that others were stirring. At the house wood smoke rose from the chimney, another redolent fragrance mingling soon with the smell of bacon frying. It is a combination familiar to everyone who has known woodland mornings. There would be talk at breakfast, the meeting with strangers -- a loss. The sunrise across the wild northern lake seemed a kind of holiness that human chatter was hound to destroy a little. The water, so still and lucent, beyond it the dark mystery of the forest, and the firs' fragrance: for this sacred experience, enjoyed alone, I would get up at dawn every day during that summer. We would be here for three months with my father joining us for July. Neither of my parents had been here before but friends, the Wymans from Painesville, had written to say that they knew of this island in the Muskoka Lakes and suggested our spending some weeks there together. After three summers in Kansas City, where the temperature day and night can stay above ninety, we were going to get away somewhere, and since my father had not been back to his native Canada for some time, the Wymans' idea appealed to my parents. On the island were five or six visiting families. Some had children, of whom only one was a girl near my age. She would turn out to be very lively, never happy unless she was engaged in some boisterous game. I thought of her as an enemy. The family who owned this tiny resort were named White. They had several grown sons and a daughter. One of the sons, Dalton, nineteen, was just back from Montreal where he had won the junior world championship in canoeing. He was dark-haired and tall, with a puckish smile, to me that year probably the most glamorous youth in the world. One could never, of course, hope to be friends with him. At the back of the house were a large vegetable garden, two or three sheds and an old boat with grass growing up through its timbers. Past them one reached a thicket. I pushed through it that first afternoon, into the woods beyond. The brush was thinner here but the trees grew densely. I wandered on, memorizing some landmarks: this boulder, this berry bush, this fallen log. I looked back. All had disappeared! It was a different grove when one turned around. The house was no longer in sight and my heart beat faster. I was lost! But one couldn't get lost on an island, although this one was large, three and a half miles long. It was only necessary to find the shore, mostly rocky and wild, and follow it back. But I still felt lost and curiously afraid. The trees, vaguely and strangely, were menacing. Not in any park, cemetery or pasture had I ever been so entirely enclosed by trees. These were massive, like giants. One surrounded by them felt helpless. They spread above, forming together a cave-like dark. They were presences. Which way had I come -- where was the shore! Fear of trees is an old reaction, still a familiar emotion on primitive levels. Eskimos camping among trees, found along Northern rivers, dare not settle down beneath one for the night until they have stood off and thrown a knife into its trunk. Many other tribes have been awed by trees. If a branch has been broken off, if its bark has been damaged, or in the case of having to fell it, an apology would be made to a tree. The blood of a slaughtered animal was brushed onto it, or it was given a drink of water. In the Punjab, a former province of India, human sacrifices were made to a certain tree every year. Trees and groves in many parts of the world have been considered sacred. In the Canadian woods I didn't believe consciously that a tree might be hostile. I was just strangely uneasy there in the eerie atmosphere of the grove. One can name this dread and call it claustrophobia, which probably is an ancient fear. A prehistoric man might have felt trapped in dense woods, and recently Sir Frank Fraser Darling, the eloquent conservationist, has said that many modern people are afraid of a wilderness, which is why they are so willing to see it destroyed. Anyway I was slightly alarmed by that island forest, and although I was rather eager to know what was there I couldn't force myself to continue farther. My going and corning were noted, for I met Dalton on the way back and he said, ''You didn't stay in the woods very long." "I was getting lost." He smiled with amusement. There were always three or four canoes pulled up on the beach. One day I got one of them out on the water and was floundering around in it when Dalton came down to the dock. He called, "Try to bring it back to the beach and I'll show you how to paddle." I sat in the bow facing him as with his strong, quick stroke he shot us out onto the lake. There he gave me the first lesson, demonstrating the right way to hold the paddle, how to turn it so smoothly in pulling it back that a canoe doesn't vary its course by an inch. "Line up the prow with some tree on the shore," he said, "and don't let it swing either side off the trunk." In shallow water again we changed places and awkwardly I tried to put into practice what he had demonstrated. A skill, a start in learning a new skill -- inspiring prospect -- from this young man who himself was dedicated to perfecting a skill: was it possible that we might have something in common? The Whites had a piano. It was in the sitting room of the house and I could no more stay away from it than I could have gone without food. My frequent playing must have been a trial to some of the other guests, especially a violinist who practiced several hours a day in his tent (a situation I didn't remind him of when I met him years later in San Francisco where he was teaching the young Yehudi Menuhin). But Dahon enjoyed my music. He used to come and stand at one end of the piano with his elbow on top, listening and watching. He gave me more paddling lessons and after a while I too could hold a canoe's prow on the trunk of a shoreline tree. In the afternoons I went out with him in his racing canoe, as ballast he said, while he kept up his training, His canoe was a little sliver of a thing with graphite all over the outside to make it slip through the water faster. In Montreal he had paddled a mile in four minutes and seven seconds, a record which probably has been beaten many times, but when he dipped in his paddle, his canoe leapt away like a dolphin. He landed us on the mainland one day and said, "Let's take a little walk." With a companion one could enjoy a forest. Besides, the trees here were of varying heights, they didn't form caves. It was an intricate scene, everything was prolifically growing -- and dying, The ground was a litter of brown leaves and fir needles and sticks. It was unkempt compared with a park but fascinating. All around us was limber movement. The grasses and wildflowers bent quivering in the flow of the breeze and the trees above were a green ruffling commotion. Their leaves, as they tossed and swung, seemed to be cutting the sky into bits, to be scattered as scraps of sunlight along the ground. Birds were lacing the air, in and out of the trees and bushes. One on the ground was jumping forward and scratching back through dead leaves and one, also searching for insects, was spiraling up a tree trunk, pressing its stiff, short tail on the bark as a prop. At that time, in June, most of the birds would be feeding young, Dalton said, and they had to work all day catching insects for them. Besides this bright movement of wings, then, there must be thousands of tinier creatures doing whatever insects do on a summer afternoon: a world everywhere alive. Dalton seemed to have realized that I knew almost nothing about what was here and was showing me things: a porcupine's tracks, a bee tree, a fox's burrow. He knocked on a tree and a flying squirrel poked its little head out of a hole. It was all wonderful, even exciting, but strange. We came out on a small elevation. Below was a meadow brimful of yellow-green sunlight. Perhaps this was the pleasantest way to enjoy a forest: with trees and brush at your back but a wide escape if anything should approach from behind. Unmentionable were wolves, bears. (They may have been there in fact. That forest is now built up but resorts not far away advertise that guests can hear wolves baying.) Dalton had brought his rifle. Was he just thinking of shooting something for fun, or was the gun for protection? The thought of escape was still there. Compare a park: only a few, spaced-out trees were allowed to grow, their dead branches were pruned away, the flowers were all in neat beds, the grass was kept mowed, never allowed to become weeds or "grasses." All controlled, therefore safe. Here the plants grew their own way and the animals went their own way -- one might appear anywhere, any time. No one knew what might happen -- did happen, for there were dead, broken trees among the live ones. Everything was wild -- naturally. That was the meaning of forests of course, that they were wild. Therefore unpredictable. Yet the wilderness was a beautiful, even enchanting place with its graceful movement and active life. Even underfoot if one scratched away the brown leaves as the bird had done, one might come upon small, secret lives. But might there be things that would bite? I had heard of tarantulas. With a feeling of cowardice, shrinking back, I wanted to leave, to return to the wide placid lake. And then I did something which made it seem that, on nature's terms, I had no right to be here at all. Dalton said, "Look!" Pointing: "There's a porcupine in the crotch of that tree over there." One of the wild inhabitants of this forest, only medium sized for an animal, sat on the branch, his back a high curve, with his quills raised and bristling. He might be lying like that to let the sunshine come into his fur, warm down to his skin. He looked sleepy. Dalton handed the rifle to me and said, "Let's see if you can hit it." He showed the way the gun should be held, braced against my shoulder, how to sight the target along the barrel. ''Now pull the trigger back with your right hand -- slowly, just squeeze it." I pulled the trigger and with astonishment saw the porcupine fall to the ground. Dalton was full of praise. "Very good! I didn't think you could do it." We went down along the side of the meadow. Beneath the tree lay the porcupine, limp and still. Even his fur and quills were flat, lifeless now. Looking smaller, this was the little creature who, a few moments earlier, had been up on the bough wrapped in sunshine, enjoying life. I burst into tears. Dalton went over alone the next day and drew out the quills and brought them to me to decorate the basket of scented sweetgrass that I, like all the women, was making. I gave them away. I never returned to the mainland forest alone, but by midsummer I'd made my own a small peninsula on the island. Paddling along its shore one morning I had tied the canoe to a tree overhanging the lake and sat in its shade doing embroidery. The point -- it was the southern tip of the island -- was narrow, not more than fifty yards wide. Through its trees I could see across to the bay on the other side and the center was open, with a thin cover of grass and wildflowers among sun-warmed rocks. It looked perfectly safe and I went ashore to investigate. There was no trail leading away from here, the point seemed private, peculiarly mine, and it pleased me very much. I came back the next day and then other days. Sometimes I walked about but more often sat under one of the trees, which were firs and quivering aspens, listening to the songs of the birds and watching them and a squirrel who was always there. I had a wonderful feeling -- I had had it too with the chipmunk -- that I was acceptable here, that I was liked, for they made little overtures even before I started feeding them bits of bread. Perhaps it helped that I talked to them. Gradually, a few moments one day, more moments the next, being there in that small safe woodland began to seem almost the same experience as making music, as the way, when I played the piano, I was the music, my physical body feeling as if it dissolved in the sounds. I could say my dimensions then were those of the melodies and the harmony that spread out from the piano in all directions. I had no consciousness of my individual self. Tenuously, imperfectly that Canadian summer, the same thing happened when I would walk around the peninsula, unafraid. It was not a wide going out and out, as with music, but again of losing myself -- this time by becoming identified with whatever I was especially aware of. It happened first with a flower. I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blueness becomes as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerettes in the center, become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with the squirrel! Finally I spent every morning there. No one knew where I had gone. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) found her authentic literary voice only after she and her husband bought and began to farm an orange grove near Cross Creek, Florida. Born in Washington, D.C., and educated at the University of Wisconsin, Rawlings wrote human-interest newspaper stories and sentimental fiction for women's magazines before moving to Florida in 1928. There she settled down to produce a steady stream of local-color stories and articles, as well as four novels, the third of which (The Yearling, 1938) won the Pulitzer Prize. In the tradition of regional writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, she used rural Florida at the time that she knew it as the setting for characters who eke out lives close to the earth. The following passage from her memoir, Cross Creek (1942), describes the hammock (in Florida, a fertile area usually higher than its surroundings and characterized by hardwoods and humus-rich soil) on the shore of Orange Lake that Rawlings often used as a retreat in her early days there. THE MAGNOLIA TREE I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to. In the lakeside hammock there is a constant stirring in the tree-tops, as though on the stillest days the breathing of the earth is yet audible. The Spanish moss sways a little always. The heavy forest thins into occasional great trees, live oaks and palms and pines. In spring, the yellow jessamine is heavy on the air, in summer the red trumpet vine shouts from the gray trunks, and in autumn and winter the holly berries are small bright lamps in the half-light. The squirrels are unafraid, and here I saw my first fox-squirrel, a huge fellow made of black shining plush. Here a skunk prowled close to me, digging industrious small holes for grubs. I sat as still as a stump, and if he saw me, as I suspect, he was a gentleman and went on steadily with his business, then loped away with a graceful rocking motion. A covey of quail passed me often, so that I came to know their trail into the blackberry thicket where they gathered in a circle for the night, making small soft cries. It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one's own world, as when any foreign country is visited. To the west, the hammock becomes damp, the trees stand more sparsely. Beyond is a long stretch of marsh where the cattle feed lazily, belly-deep in water hyacinths and lily pads, then the wide lake itself. There is a clamor of water birds, long-legged herons and cranes, visiting seagulls from the coasts, wild ducks, coots, the shrill scream of fish-hawks, with now and then a baldheaded eagle loitering in the sky, ready to swirl down and take the fish-hawk's catch from him in midair. Across the lake, visible the four miles only on a clear day, is the tower of the old Samson manse, decaying in the middle of the still prosperous orange grove. From the tower itself, decrepit and dangerous, is a sight of a tropical world of dreams, made up of glossy trees and shining water and palm islands. When I am an old woman, so that too much queerness will seem a natural thing, I mean to build a tower like it on my own side of the lake, and I shall sit there on angry days and growl down at anyone who disturbs me. I dig leaf mould from this hammock to enrich my roses and camellias and gardenias. When I went with my basket one morning a breath of movement, an unwonted pattern of color, caught my eye under a tangle of wild grapevines. A wild sow lay nested at the base of a great magnolia, At a little distance, piled one on the other, lay her litter, clean and fresh as the sunshine, the birth-damp still upon them. Sow and litter were exhausted with the business of birthing. The one lay breathing profoundly, absorbed in the immensity of rest. The others lay like a mass of puppies, the lowest-layered tugging himself free to climb again on top of the pile and warm his tender belly. The mass shifted. The most adventuresome, a pied morsel of pig with a white band like a belt around his middle, wobbled over to the sow's side. He gave a delighted whimper and the whole litter ambled over to discover the miracle of the hairy breasts. The jungle hammock breathed. Life went through the moss-hung forest, the swamp, the cypresses, through the wild sow and her young, through me, in its continuous chain. We were all one with the silent pulsing. This was the thing that was important, the cycle of life, with birth and death merging one into the other in an imperceptible twilight and an insubstantial dawn. The universe breathed, and the world inside it breathed the same breath. This was the cosmic life, with suns and moons to make it lovely. It was important only to keep close enough to the pulse to feel its rhythm, to be comforted by its steadiness, to know that Life is vital, and one's own minute living a torn fragment of the larger cloth. Luci Tapahonso (born 1953) explains that "the land is an integral part of my history, my life, and even my name," which identifies her as one of the ''Beside the Big Water" people. In five collections of poems and stories as well as two children's books, she has sought to keep alive the worldview and language of her Navajo culture -- a culture that values family, community, and place. Born in Shiprock, New Mexico, Tapahonso learned English as a second language at boarding school and began writing poetry when she was nine years old. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. in English at the University of New Mexico and has taught English there and at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. The following poem from A Breeze Swept Through (1987) about the births of her two daughters, Lori Tazbah and Misty Dawn, emphasizes their close bond with the earth. A BREEZE SWEPT THROUGH The first born of
dawn woman And in
mid-November, Barbara Dean (born 1946), along with fifteen friends, went to live on a square mile of wilderness land in northern California in 1971. She built a yurt with her own hands and settled into a life of intentional community close to nature. Her book, Wellspring: A Story from the Deep Country (1979), source of the selection that follows, is all eloquent and insightful exploration of the joys and challenges of living the countercultural back-to-the-land dream that so many youth of the sixties generation cherished. What makes it timeless is its engagement with the deep questions of how to craft a meaningful life. In it, she writes, "The land, for me, is a wellspring of pure delight . ... I am here because it is where I belong. This is where, for me, the world without and the world within become one, and I am pulled resolutely toward God." Dean was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and earned a B.A. in French from Duke University and an M.A. in psychology from Sonoma State University. She still lives in the northern California wilderness and is an executive editor at Island Press, a nonprofit publisher of books on environmental issues. THE MANY AND THE ONE Spring is in the air. The breeze is gentle with the smell of birthing, the earth radiates freshness, the birds sing with more abandon than they have for months. The first wildflowers are in bloom in the deep forest: the hardy toothwort, the delicate purple shooting star. The tender green of new growth is everywhere. Grass has even sprouted through some cracks in the concrete of my floor: what better testament to life renewed? I cannot stay inside. I gather up my quilt, pull back the blanket door, and venture forth. The breeze plays with my hair as I make my way after an invisible pull toward the creek. On the southern slope of the hill that falls steeply to the stream, not far from the yurt, but out of sight, there is a tiny natural shelf in the hillside. I spread my quilt on the earth, which is still damp from winter rains. The day is cool, but the slope is sheltered from the wind, and its angle catches the full power of the sun. I lie down, arms outstretched, motionless against the earth. The earth molds itself to my curves: we fit. The sun reaches deep, through skin to bone, through surface to center. I smell the rich damp warmth of almost spring, see through my fingers and pores, listen with my bones, forget to breathe. My attention is drawn to a small oak tree, not far from where I lie. Outlined against the clear blue sky, little bits of newborn green are barely visible on the tips of the gray moss-covered branches. Strings of Spanish moss drip toward the earth, dancing now and then in the breeze. A jay lands on a branch near me, cocks his head, and flies away again. The wind rises slightly; the whole tree responds, limbs swaying. Though my little shelf is hidden from the wind, I seem to feel its push against me, too, as I watch the little oak. I sense the branches moving, feel the creak of winter stiffness, feel new life begin to run through its body as the sun and wind pull and push. I feel the pull on kinky limbs, the sluggishness of parts still half asleep that respond only slowly to the call of the sun. I feel the breeze blow off the tree's winter coat and awaken something inside, deep within the core. And I sense the tree responding, branches swaying, bulky body moving slowly, sluggishly, as it can. And then I am the tree. Another jay alights and I feel its touch as on a distant extremity. I am still here, still flat on the hillside hidden from the wind, but somehow I extend above and beyond and around myself to include the tree, the earth, the rocks, the breeze. The earth, the rocks, the sky, and I interpenetrate. We are one. I feel a deep, beatific relaxation, The boundaries that I think of as "me" are suddenly no more than illusion. My body's limits are a product of the same surface tension that allows a water bug to skate on top of a pond. Now, as I lie here, the tension is released, the illusion suspended. The varied personalities and centers of energy that make up my place on the hillside merge, and all of life flows into and out of one another. And the many -- the wonderful, entertaining, diverse manifestations of life -- become gloriously One. May Swenson (1913-1989) was a keen observer of "the organic, the inorganic, and the psychological world" who won numerous honors (including a Bollingen Prize and a MacArthur Foundation grant) and much praise from fellow poets for her fresh, imaginative poetry. One reviewer has commented that Swenson "epitomized the art of awareness" and that for her, "the cosmos was a whirl of activity, of orbiting planets and galloping weather, of flickering birds and unfurling blooms, of bears, apples, and oceans"; another has placed Swenson in the "quirky tradition" of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop. She was born and raised in Logan, Utah, by Swedish parents who became American citizens. Her father was a professor at what was then Utah State Agricultural College (now Utah State University), from which she graduated with a B.A. in 1939. She worked as a reporter for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, as an editor for the avant-garde publisher New Directions in New York City, and as a poet-in-residence at several universities, but always she wrote poetry, publishing eleven volumes during her lifetime. The following poem originally appeared in To Mix with Time (1963). I WILL LIE DOWN I will lie down in
autumn Swept into a
hollow I will lie inert
unseen Gather me I will sleep face
down Trail over me
cloud
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