Longevity of dormant seeds . . .

. . . .or dormant blogs abandoned for years. Now sprouting again. According to this bit from omnipresent wikipedia: ``Dormancy tends to be closely associated with environmental conditions.`` The culture alive, the time is right . . . .

Still practicing, always beginning

My usual hesitation sitting down to write something here almost lames me again: how to make a distinction between what "belongs" in writing about the environment (a word I find ever more useless) when it seems that it is inseparable from everything else that goes on in a life every day. How to separate attending to the flour moths that have invaded the bird seed then moved on to the grains stored in the kitchen to flutter throughout the house. How to converse with the driveway-paving sales guy who ignores the polite sign on the front door asking that salespeople not disturb us, who pursues his sale pitch with the cold wind chilling the house as he insists he can pave our driveway cheaply --"only $2300" [!] (after I've told him that paved driveways are undesirable for rain run-off that should not flood the sewer system) if only I sign the paper now and pay later, because after all, our house is only a "tear down" in a neighbourhood where McMonster houses are the rage. How in fact live a life that is committed to attention to "ecological issues" in a culture in which daily experiences are divorced from simply being a creature among creatures caring about our fellow-creatures' well-being?

The problem of talking about "environmental" or "ecological" issues is the aura it gives them of being somehow "out there", as if we're not all in the soup together.

There's a nearby book emporium (one of those industrial-strength chain stores with a massive footprint), the only bookstore in these far reaches, where I can go to browse the news stands for any periodicals of interest. Saturday's hunt yielded a rare copy of The Sun (January 2010) with an interview of Sandra Steingraber, "On How We've Made The Environment Dangerous To Our Health." Her next book, to be published in the spring of 2011, concerns "the ecology of childhood", saying what should be common sense: "Our food becomes us; it becomes the bodies of my children: their muscles, blood, and brain tissue." Except that even that basic knowledge seems to have been lost from the press of daily life as well as how such knowledge connects to being part of the world where the food is grown, where it comes from, who does the work of growing it, what kind of water the food absorbed, who buys it and sells it (whether water or food), what kind of food do children eat at school, what kind of food is advertised on television, and the list goes on to expand to every aspect of being alive, of being alive in this world now. Except that now, such explorations have become aspects of "environmental studies" with the weight of scientific studies and arguments and economics, with no space for an argument for joy and connection and sensual pleasure.

What my "ecology" of childhood included was the smell of laundry taken down from the clothesline; homemade bread baked in unglazed clay flour pots for the crust and the special flavour;  family expeditions on Sundays to the creek where people got together to wash their cars: no soap, just buckets of water hauled up from the creek, rags for washing and rags for drying, the kids chasing gophers or at creek edge looking for tadpoles; planting potato eyes in the garden and digging little trenches for sweet pea seeds; playing baseball in a vacant lot until after sundown.

Many people have written eloquently about the possibilities for transforming our lives in small ways, and many people are restoring the simplicity of our lives.  People are reading Steingraber and her informed and passionate writing, people are reading Utne Reader for the essay by David Barash's insight that "our relationship to the natural world is a Ponzi scheme" -- how we are ripping off the natural world out of greed and lust for profit. And some people may find a copy of World Pulse and its stories about women changing bit by bit the way they are transforming their lives, from political action to fair trade. All valuable pieces of writing -- but even for a writer, words are not enough, they are often "out there" and not where we live.

Where we live is in our imaginations and daydreams as well as our anxieties, and the language that addresses the limits of language -- poetry and fiction that restore connection rather than itemizing the problems we face -- can keep our internal fires alive, balance the intellectual awareness of the crisis talk about climate change, and take us out of ourselves.

More of this next time -- the mail has arrived, tea needs to be made, birds need feeding, and a few seeds to start sprouting, as well as other writing to sink into.

I want to explore the importance of language older than words -- not (just) the essential book by Derek Jensen but communication beyond the use of human language.

birdwatching at midnight

Getting caught up on reading the blogs of others when I'm too baffed for my brain to send messages accurately to my fingers. One of the blogs I read includes a 10-second video of a redstart and, for poetry loving birders, a list of names for pigeons that Rimbaud noted when in England.

In a state of being-too-tired-to-write but not-wanting-to-go-to-bed, I decided to look on youtube for anything appealing on "birdwatching in winter" and found one filmed by someone with (probably) frozen fingers in Southern Ontario, and with music by Sigur Ros, appropriately.

Task for first light: scrub out the bird feeders, open the garage, see if the resident chipmunk has left any seeds,  and give the feathered locals some breakfast.

time to plant seeds again

If I felt keen to begin yet another unfinished novel, it could have as title perhaps: What happened to last year? Not as mysterious as Last Year in Marienbad, but now that I recall, not much happened in that film except some beautiful black and white cinematography, whereas my past year was typically event-full, and my determination to spend more time writing, indeed: to devote myself to getting writing done, dominated.

Over past months much of my writing time has been interleaved with a lot of reading, in the areas of poetry, poetics, cultural theory, and -- yes -- ongoing reading in the areas of deep ecology, environmental art, and climate change. That left little time for posting to a blog, and at last count I think I have about four blogs begun on various burners, all of them sitting and barely simmering, just taking up space in the ether.

One of the frustrations of sitting at a desk at home or at a library, continuously tapping at a keyboard or scribbling with a pen, is the isolation from what we habitually call the real world, as if the act of writing somehow is not itself "real" and when humans set aside time to write from our hearts and minds, that the words we write are not not real, and therefore have no "meaning" unless they appear on television or newspapers or magazines or some form of published media. Some of the finest reading I've found is on blogs written by people who are variously wise, witty, informed, passionate, eloquent, and more than anything else, dedicated to sending their words out into the world to find their own communities of readers. The process of committing time and thoughts and language to the void is daunting: many of the sites I explore are created with lavish dexterity that boondoggles me, and few blogs that I follow elicit comments of substance, possibly because so many of the readers are spending their time writing blogs themselves. Yet there is a kind of mycelium created by all this languaging that creates a sense of engagement in matters of importance to our collective culture. Therefore, rather than commenting on posts by others, I will return to this fallow blog and start writing here again.

I owe this growth spurt to email conversations with a couple of west-coasters who are reliably passionate about our planet and our fellow creatures. One of them is a non-blogger albeit a generous communicator, writer/editor, community activist, circle-dancer and ongoing inspiration. The other is an educator in the best sense of the word, in her ability not only to devote herself to "finding out" but also to passing it on with a generous spirit, and for anyone wanting inspiration in green education I recommend the resources of her blog.

With some temerity, because this is a work in progress, I'll post here something new that arose from a much larger piece I'm working on. On a later post, I'll elaborate.

Continuous birth*
"people do not always agree about what is alive and what is not"
- Tim Ingold

from dust blown through rain
a mucky birth
bursting to flow
nested in weeds
among tadpole swerves

grown into frog-rich
rivulet voicing
ripples and splash
through curves
running open

running long running
wider rainfall nurtured
banking and overflow
captured and stilled
in a lake built under a bridge

life source choked
now to narrow passage
un moribondage
a stagnant sinking
corseted by thick-turfed roof

far below a fashioned course
for good walks ruined :
bridged silted and silenced
the buried creek barely breathes
dreams of rebirth


January 16/2010
(revised January 21/10)
n.l.

*from words in an essay by Tim Ingold, “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought” – also the epigraph; and acknowledging Mark Twain’s definition of a golf course. The words un moribondage (morbidity) from a poem by Douglas Oliver for the resonance of bondage in it.

can words give us wings?

With the temperature dropping to -20 C. tonight plus windchill, again I wonder where the birds -- if there are any birds: I have seen so few in the past weeks -- will find shelter. During the gale-force winds a few weeks ago I was huddled over a warm computer reading a draft of a poem written by a friend who is an accomplished and award-winning poet. She had discovered the work of photographer Harri Kallio whose fascination with the extinction of the dodo from its home on the Mauritius Islands led to undertaking (an appropriate term in both senses) its life-like "re-creation" in order to photograph the manufactured bird in the dodo's original biogeographical niche. My friend wrote a poem about the bird and its fate, and the oddness of its reimagining; the draft of her poem so moved me that, in conjunction with reading Peter Quammen's brilliant book, The Song of the Dodo:Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, I sat and listened to the wind howling and began to imagine what this world would be like if all the birds I'm used to seeing were to go the way of the dodo.

What resulted was a lament for the absence of birds, from imagining this city without birds, and having also been reading the play, Birds, by Aristophanes -- I combined words with wings in my own poem, "faster than flight":

"INFORMER: How can words give a man wings?
PEISTHETAERUS: Words can give everybody wings."
-- from Aristophanes, Birds

faster than the flight of any
bird this December wind
from where we stand the snow
blows sideways and all the birds
have hidden still our flight
inside to a hollow hearth
with winter howling down with
darkness more hours than light
breeds nights so deep in dis-
ordered dreams and no
birdsong or morning song
to wake us or -- is this
night the long wake of all
the unsung ones now plucked
and eaten dead lamented as
dodos long gone how long
till all gone till gone is
forgotten and where shall
we go? flightless
into air empty of song, passion
imagination memory pulled
from our pens -- o quills that were:

where will we be? our songs too
unsung

This is still what might be called a "raw" or uncooked version, not likely to change much however, as the rawness in this instance is all, and sometimes there's a place for an outburst of poetry such as the old skalds in the mead halls would have brought forth.

I believe we need to sing and praise our fellow creatures whenever possible; we don't need the clash of ipod overflow and supermarket/elevator/coffee shop piped in muzak -- we need to listen to other songs from the world outside.

Coyote book calling

Having moved on from an intense season of eco-art, straw-bale building, and storytelling, then capped it with a brief holiday up on the Bruce Peninsula (guest of a long-time storyteller who also manages the Bruce Peninsula Bird Sanctuary), I came back to the Big City and began the meltdown of starting to organize my massive book holdings.

Books -- those reformulated trees garnished with ink and glue -- are not, for me at least, simply household objects like pots and pans and furniture that are separate from my embodied self. It is not possible to pick up a book to catalogue it on LibraryThing without reading it and so reentering it and when reentering it, knowing that it might be the same physical item, but a completely different "river". The text is fluid, as I was reminded earlier today when I came across the copy of an article that was passed on to me by a friend who is a poet and editor from one of her friends who is a poet and editor/publisher, about the way a poetry book's organization affects the reader. The essay is "Dynamic Design: the Structure of Books of Poems" by Natasha Saje, from The Iowa Review (Fall 2005). Caught up in the significance of the phrase "how structure complicates meaning" has real bearing on my involvement with the books I gravitate towards whether they be poetry books or books about Buddhist ecology or desert landscapes. The reader enters the book as much as the words and pictures of the book enter the reader. It is a mutual process, it changes each time the book is opened to be read and the reader is open to the act of reading.

And the entire process leads to the reader writing her own book, spurred by the reading or readings.

All the above my excuse for not posting to this or my other blogs of late, since the writing that takes place has not been happening on this (or these) sites.

There is nonetheless a relevance to ecology, call it human ecology, because I eschew the word "environment": the concept of the human as somehow separate from the environment is much the same as the reader apart from the book.

More musing on this later, since I'm determined to head out to an exhibit of handmade books by the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild, at York Quay on Toronto's Harbourfront. The exhibit closes day after tomorrow, and I want to see how book artists have transformed what we so crudely call "nature" into books.

moving on . . .

"Spring clean-up" is late hereabouts, and involves not only sweeping dead beetles out of the large enclosed rear enclosed porch but also trying to organize the stacks of books and papers as well as tidying up my corner of cyberspace.

One of the books retrieved from a pile to place on a shelf of kindred nature/ecology/earth wisdom/environmental/land art books included the essay that inspired the title of this blog, which I had begun with such noble intentions three years ago and has been mostly moribund in all that time. Earlier this year my involvement in an "ecological artmaking project" at the Royal Conservatory of Music led me to set up another blog to track some of what we did over the ten-week period, culminating in performances at Earth Day and other local venues. Now that the process -- or at least my involvement with it -- has ended (it now seems), I intend to copy here, section by section, the contents of the artmaking blog, in order to refer to it and/or add comments.

Walking

My personal "landscape" project still not really begun. Inspired by reading about Hamish Fulton's walking through countryside (also John Grande's interview of him in Art Nature Dialogues) I thought of starting an individual suburban walking project. Hamish of course interested not at all in urban landscapes.

Kathleen Vaughan wrote a PhD dissertation about the walks she made in her neighbourhood with her dog. I have no dog (family allergies) and still after 22 years here do not consider this suburban enclave a "neighbourhood" in any meaningful sense, but still think a geographical scoping of this middleclass comfort zone could provide me with some grounded feeling of place. A "psychogeography" (as in e.g. Debord) as it were.

Yesterday I lit on Richard Long's site by typing in "walking as an art form", also noting one statement he makes:

"Walking itself has a cultural history, from Pilgrims to the wandering Japanese poets, the English Romantics and contemporary lon-distance walkers."

My first "textwork" would be an account of an unremarkable walk-to-get-to-places from the suburbs downtown to the Canadian Opera Company for a lecture plus DVD showing of Dialogue of the Carmelites (Strasbourg production -- thinking now if at as a tragic final walk for the nuns. . . ), then along Front St. to St. Lawrence Market, streetcar and subway hop to meet daughter for tea then via Cumberland to Bay St. subway Lost and Found in hunt for gloves lost earlier in transit, thence homeward. Noting the varieties of walking involved:

trudging: through deep drifts of new snow on yet-to-be-cleared sidewalks
hiking: up the long hill to the subway station
leaping: over puddles of slush at street corners
speed-walking: to get to the COC on time given subway delays
purposeful walking: to get to St. Lawrence Market to buy bread en route to Union Station
fatigued shuffling, including careful walking: up sloppy slippery steps from Museum stop to Wymilwood
strolling: from Bayview no. 22 bus northbound along the street of snow packed down by cars, finally reaching home towards twilight

If I were to compose a haiku for each type of walking, the experience might be artistically elevated into a haibun.

Most of the day however was devoted to time-motion walking on a map preordained by city streets and transit routes. On the beaten path, except where breaking trail through snow, and only one other set of bootprints. Should have recorded that with a camera.

On my list of books to read: Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust; Robyn Davidson's Tracks; and Thoreau on walking.

Meanwhile, in the ordinary course of the day, there is still the ordinary act of walking.