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SISTERS OF THE EARTH -- WOMEN'S PROSE & POETRY ABOUT NATURE |
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In memory of
Quinka (1986-2002), my dearly beloved feline companion and assistant *** This earth is
my sister; PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION When Sisters of the Earth was published a dozen years ago, I had no idea it would find as large and appreciative an audience as it has. A friend wrote to me recently, ''I've seen it in the hands of everyone from teenage girls to elderly blue-haired widows." Relatives have reported spotting it on bookstore shelves in far-flung national parks. Letters of gratitude have come from Texas and New York, Norway and Canada. One woman sent me a postcard saying that the book had sustained her through a course of chemotherapy. Graduate students have told me that it inspired or helped them to write dissertations. Professors have based courses on it. And when I tried to hand a copy soon after it came out to California State Senator Tom Hayden at a fund-raising tea, he told me he already owned one and had read Marge Piercy's poem "The Common Living Dirt" from it at a political rally the week before. I like to think the popularity of Sisters in our world of greed, speed, and terror contains a couple of heartening messages. First, it suggests that underneath the callousness and outright antagonism toward nonhuman nature we see all around us, there exists a great longing for intimacy with the earth and its creatures. There exists a recognition that, as Theodora Stanwell- Fletcher wrote more than half a century ago in the August 1951 Mt. Holyoke Alumni Quarterly, "in this feverish and high- strung age we need desperately quiet and naturalness and sanity. And there is something in this contact with earthy things, whether it's a passion for birds or gardening or camping, which is restoring and health-giving and wholesome." The popularity of Sisters also hints that tens of thousands of readers have grasped instinctively what Thomas Berry articulates in his book The Great Work: that the wisdom of women is one of the essential traditions to draw on as we engage in what he calls the Great Work of our time, coming into a mutually enhancing relationship with the earth. Women's special province is seeing beauty and significance in the small, the close-to-home, and attending to the realm of the heart. In the Great Work, women of words such as those whose voices are gathered here hold in place a pattern of love and respect for life in its myriad forms. They point us to the natural sources where we can find meaning and satisfaction even while living in a culture gone berserk. They remind us that beyond the world of commerce that so occupies our attention is a much larger economy that provides food for the soul if we're willing to let it in. I also had no idea when Sisters first came out that the following years would see such a glorious blossoming of work by and interest in women nature writers. Women who were just starting to make names for themselves -- such as Terry Tempest Williams, Linda Hogan, Gretel Ehrlich, Sharman Apt Russell, and Linda Hasselstrom -- have become firmly established with a steady output of creative works. Those who were already prolific -- among them Maxine Kumin, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and Ursula Le Guin -- have continued to be so. New voices for the earth have emerged -- including Mary Sojourner, Lisa Knopp, Marilou Awiakta, Penny Harter, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Kathleen Dean Moore. Numerous anthologies of women's outdoor writing have appeared. Two conferences on American women nature writers have been held. And in July 1999, the 12th International James Fenimore Cooper Seminar and Summer Course broadened its traditional focus and featured presentations on the daughter of the famous novelist Susan Fenimore Cooper, author of the first book of nature writing by an American woman. In view of this profusion, Sisters of the Earth began to seem to me like a bouquet of flowers in need of freshening. A few pieces began to seem dated or not as representative of an author's work as some newer effort. I was eager to incorporate writing by long-dead women whose work I discovered after the first edition appeared -- such as Charlotte Forten Grimke, Frances Theodora Parsons, and Elizabeth C. Wright -- and to tuck in fresh pieces by writers who have come on the scene more recently. And I wanted to bring the biographies up to date and round them out in view of new developments, recent scholarship, and better research tools, particularly the Web. (While doing online research for this edition, I felt a distinct kinship with the orb weaver I watched down at the creek a couple of summers ago as she hauled a line of silky thread out the tip of her abdomen and moved nimbly around creating a neat pattern.) The basic framework remains the same as in the first edition and many of the same pieces appear here, but the sections have been expanded. Still, I'm acutely aware that, as in the first edition, there are many fine nature writers whose work isn't included. And there are two writers whose work would be found here were it not for their policy of declining inclusion in single-gender anthologies: Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard. I leave it up to you to search out further reading. The bibliography lists selected other works by the authors represented in this anthology but doesn't attempt to be comprehensive, as the field has simply grown too large for that. Which brings me to address something Joy Williams noted in her 1997 essay "Florida": "Nature writing is enjoying a renaissance. This seems to be in lieu of nature itself, which is not." Certainly it seems that everything the writers in this volume value and cherish is increasingly endangered. Our towns, our cities, and our world are changing in unprecedented ways as human population growth, consumerism, corporate globalization, genetic engineering, global warming, terrorism, and war take their toll. The air we breathe and the water we drink are more and more laden with contaminants, the vistas we once enjoyed are increasingly obscured by human sprawl, and the species that are left with nowhere else to go are dying out. It seems harder and harder to find quiet moments and unspoiled places in nature. As the earth suffers, so do our souls. Joy Harjo, in A Map to the Next World, suggests that "the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money ... best describe the detour from grace." With these realities in mind, I've come to understand Sisters of the Earth as a book about love in the face of loss. As my own heart has been repeatedly broken open by loss both personal and global over the past dozen years, I've realized that many of the women in this book have written from broken hearts (Mary Austin comes to mind, as do Ina Coolbrith, Gretel Ehrlich, Sue Hubbell, Terry Tempest Williams, Linda Hasselstrom, Alice Walker, Mary Sojourner, Pam Houston, and Barbara Kingsolver) or in the knowledge that what is closest to their hearts is threatened with destruction. And so this is a book about keeping the heart open even when it's clear that it will be broken, even after it's been broken, even though it's sure to be broken again and again. A childhood landscape that once offered magic and mystery is plowed under or paved over. A cherished companion animal or the parent who taught us to love nature dies. A tree we've developed a special connection with is cut to make way for the widening of a road. A creek we go to for refreshment on hot days is choked with litter or runs dry as the demands of upstream water users multiply. On and on goes the litany of loss for those who cherish nature's beauty, integrity, and nurturance. "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on," writes Mary Oliver in her poem "Wild Geese." "Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again." Against all odds, the world goes on. Amazingly, in the face of so much bad news about how we're conducting ourselves in this guesthouse called Earth, we can still cultivate a connection with nature that can sustain us. All we have to do is peel our attention away from the human drama and listen to the testimony of those other voices that are always calling our name -- "over and over announcing your place in the family of things," as Oliver puts it. The writing in this book invites us into a more attentive relationship with nature as it moves through our bodies, as it moves through the land and the weather and the seasons and the creatures. At the same time, it reminds us of this essential truth: relating to the natural world from the heart as much as from the mind is what's required of our species if we're to slow or stop our accelerating dash to destruction. Cultivating a feeling connection to the creation around us, a heartfelt sense of the sacred in nature and in ourselves, is our strongest lifeline. After September 11, 2001, Mary Sojourner wrote in Bonelight, "Now that we live in true wilderness, a place in which danger lies on all sides and GPS devices and cell phones won't help us, we have no choice but to go in, to the mysterious territory of our hearts." "We need to constantly hone ourselves to be made strong, not to rule and destroy but to continue toward a beautiful sense of meaning and order," writes Joy Harjo in A Map to the Next World. "The heart knows everything." I carry the words of these women with me as seeds, as compass, as talismans. I live more simply now than I did when Sisters first came out. I work part-time as a gardener. More of my clothes come from the thrift store and fewer from the mall. I don't watch TV or subscribe to a newspaper. My capacity for engaging in a conversation with other-than-human nature has deepened, as has my conviction that our culture makes people sick and the antidote is mindful and daily connection with those forces that remain beyond human control. A couple of summers ago, with the words of my literary mentors in the first edition of Sisters held close and a copy of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in hand, I apprenticed myself to the local creek, a fifteen-minute bike ride through agricultural fields (now threatened with development) from my apartment. I took grief, loneliness, and confusion to the water and watched it transform over time into gopher snakes and orb weavers, wintercress and thorn apples, red-tailed hawks and white herons, talking leaves and full-bellied moons. I stepped into the void and found that it wasn't empty, that it was occupied by a myriad of other beings riding the same river of time as myself. The writing in this book gives us a vocabulary and a way of seeing. But ultimately, with these words resonating in our consciousness, we must turn to the book of nature itself. We each inhabit a place on earth that invites closer inspection. It matters how we think about and touch this place during our brief and precious time in this world. I hope you'll discover, as the women whose words are included here have, that nature repays our interest. We can cultivate a bond to a place and its creatures by a commitment of care and attention over time, and that place can come to reside in us as surely as we reside in it. If we bring an open heart to the task, we're certain to find beauty, solace, and steadiness. Let's go, then. Let us be faithful to what we love. In the words of Nancy Newhall, "Tenderly now, let us turn to the earth." LORRAINE ANDERSON
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