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.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Thursday, November 06, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
A simple glass of water
Hiatus in posting here: or: now stepping into a different river.
The Heraclitean river has kept on flowing, and is an apt metaphor for what prompts me to dip my toes in again. In stimulating conversation with a woman who is a passionate activist devoted to the implementation of environmental studies in the curriculum of
Although water is a necessity of life, it is in too many parts of the word a luxury, and the lack of it in readily available potable form causes immense suffering and death.
When I sent my environmental activist friend a copy of a poem about drinking water – an eloquent, profound, simple poem – she excitedly asked for it to be posted to the list serve where she daily posts news on all manner of issues related to learning about how to green our world. I have delayed for days, not for lack of will, but because I realized that I had so much to say about water, having come across yet more writings and poems in the past week, and wanting to send off not just one poem. This poem, however, will be a beginning, a “sip” only, a slip into deeper waters.
I hope Ross Leckie won’t mind my sending out this exquisite poem from his collection, Gravity’s Plumb Line, published by Gaspereau Press in 2005. I recommend the entire book for (to quote the publisher) “his poems bring the lushness of natural abundance in contact with the process of comprehending its intricacies.” For me, his fine attention in luminous language to the dailiness of our human activities, so rooted in habit and place, expands our awareness of who we are, where we are, and what we do – even the simple act of drinking a glass of water.
When you say you need water you are speaking
of the ordinary, not the fine spray of a nozzle
wisping the delicate petals in the garden,
nor the faint drizzle that is not quite fog, not quite rain.
You are likely thinking of a glass, of a liquid
sliding over that itch in your throat.
But then you notice the glass itself is water.
Its waves rippling, you can see the flow of it,
its little turbulences, its shallow remembrance
of silicon dioxide. It is, as the physicists would say,
"a supercooled liquid, rather than a true solid."
If you drop it, it sounds like an ocean against the rocks.
There is too much water, we think. We need
to take it away in drains, sewers, sluices and pipes.
But sometimes there is a thirst like a pair of scissors
cutting across the fabric of the throat. Then water
seeps into a sheet of paper and infiltrates its fibres,
gently tugging them apart and language
dissolves. It soaks the very air we breathe,
humidity as thick as a wool suit on a summer's
day. A glass of cold water has the capability
to condense droplets right out of the air.
It is so innocuous sitting there on the table.
It belongs to everyone, its sweat on a thick day
seems a sweat without work, an imaginary ease.
So many have never seen a glass of water,
they have so little of it. Will we ever hold
it in our hands again in this form of amnesia?
You forget its dribble into the future. It is the pure
source of the present, its transparent anguish.
[53] & [54] – in Ross Leckie’s Gravity’s Plumb Line, Gaspereau Press, 2005. © Ross Leckie
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Our green blood, our lungs, our forests: ourselves. . .
. . . or: humans in the feedback loop.
Sorting through papers to file them (the family motto being something like debeo ordinare), I came across what was intended as an introduction for an article for the Canadian Journal of Herbalism. The article has yet to be completed, life having interjected its complexities as it tends to, nor can I put my hands on two of the books I refer to in order to amplify on a couple of points, but by setting it down in its fledgling form, I hope to revive it and develop it.
There is a passage in Tree: A Life Story (Suzuki & Grady -- one of the books that is eluding me at the moment) that more than anything I've read about trees, brings home to me a sense of kinship with them in an intimate physical sense. Walking in old-growth hardwood forests, or in Toronto's densely treed ravines, or in arboreta, or in a sacred grove I know where a religious hermit once lived near a stream northeast of the city, I have many times felt the life of the particular community of trees in a powerful way that has always left me wordless.
Our human penchant for abstraction leads us often into dealing with the natural world through metaphor, an attempt to connect with a rich and complex world with a well-chosen and memorable word or phrase. For it's not just our opposable thumbs and the way they handle tools that set us apart (we like to think) from other species, it's our peculiar use of language. Thanks to language, we can make distinctions between tree and fern, city and country, mind and body, us and them, right and wrong, nature and civilization, health and illness. We find it much more difficult to see -- and articulate -- layers, overlaps, interconnectedness, synchronicity, symbiosis, as our language-inflected brains sort and sift. If we struggle persistently with words and their limitations, we might end up becoming poets or mystics or philosophers, but still the way that language shapes our consciousness dominates our lives.
What struck me when reading John Redden's "Letter" from the editor's desk in the Canadian Journal of Herbalism XXV (2) with its eloquent description of the import of the fairly recent field of psychoneuroimmunology was his opening of the door beyond the linguistic compartments into which we categorize aspects of our human orgnaism. At least now, Western models of medicine can comfortably conceptualize linkages between organs and "systems" (cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, limbic, digestive, and so on) usually treated as discrete entities. We now feel more in tune with talking about feedback loops between our conveniently labeled systems and their interactions with our psychological and emotional states. Candace Pert's book, Molecules of Emotion, was a groundbreaking account of her work in what became the new field of "PIN". Six years ago, a wizardly cybernetician friend by the name of Stafford Beer recommended that I read her book, and a quick search for "psychoneuroimmunology" on Google at one point recently yielded 28,300 sites. Doubtless these included a lot of duplications and dead-end references, not to mention hosts of book-floggers, but there was still enough verbiage incorporoating the new paradigm floating around to consume the most dedicated air-ware fanatic.
The site that led the list when I searched was for "The PsychoNeuroImmunology
Research Society" at http://www.pnirs.org/is, calling itself "an international organization for researchers in a number of scientific and medical disciplines, including pyschology, neurosciences, immunology, pharmacology, psychiatry, behavioral medicine, infectious diseases, and rheumatology, who are interested in interactions between the nervous system and the immune system, and the relationship between behavior and health." Rather a self-reflexicve feedback loop with more a splintering of categories than an actual breaking down of the tradional -ologies.
John's editorial in CJH took the paradigm even further by suggesting that herbalists have an important part to play by helping people to "weave people, science, nature and life into a tapestry that is evolving and sustaining."
I feel a need to push it further by saying: the tapestry is already there. Our species is -- has always been -- part of what gets called the feedback loop. It is still our human pattern of behaviour to say: WE will weave the tapestry. WE will take care of the forests. In other words: WE still see ourselves as separate, as caretakers, as stewards, as users, as researchers -- whatever the noun might be that we use to designate ourselves as the supreme beings, the experts, the fixers, when what might be needed more urgently is to begin to see how we as creatures fit into what we call the tapestry, how all the parts are already woven together, and then learn how to act or better yet "not act" in ways that do not rupture and ruin the whole.
The passage in the Suzuki/Grady book that struck me with awe, is a description of Donald Culross Peattie's work in the lab (more than a half-century ago now) to understand chlorophyll -- the life-blood of so much of the plant world -- and to synthesize it. What he discovered was that the resulting green substance was not only in feel and appearance the very replica albeit differently coloured of human blood, but that its chemical composition differed from human blood by one crucial element particular to each. This may be old hat to a biochemist, but for a reader with a sense of kinship with non-human life forms, the implications are resounding and far more concrete than metaphor. When I locate my copy of the book, I'll revisit the passage, try to recapture the impact it had on first reading, and just let the image sink in all over again.
Sorting through papers to file them (the family motto being something like debeo ordinare), I came across what was intended as an introduction for an article for the Canadian Journal of Herbalism. The article has yet to be completed, life having interjected its complexities as it tends to, nor can I put my hands on two of the books I refer to in order to amplify on a couple of points, but by setting it down in its fledgling form, I hope to revive it and develop it.
There is a passage in Tree: A Life Story (Suzuki & Grady -- one of the books that is eluding me at the moment) that more than anything I've read about trees, brings home to me a sense of kinship with them in an intimate physical sense. Walking in old-growth hardwood forests, or in Toronto's densely treed ravines, or in arboreta, or in a sacred grove I know where a religious hermit once lived near a stream northeast of the city, I have many times felt the life of the particular community of trees in a powerful way that has always left me wordless.
Our human penchant for abstraction leads us often into dealing with the natural world through metaphor, an attempt to connect with a rich and complex world with a well-chosen and memorable word or phrase. For it's not just our opposable thumbs and the way they handle tools that set us apart (we like to think) from other species, it's our peculiar use of language. Thanks to language, we can make distinctions between tree and fern, city and country, mind and body, us and them, right and wrong, nature and civilization, health and illness. We find it much more difficult to see -- and articulate -- layers, overlaps, interconnectedness, synchronicity, symbiosis, as our language-inflected brains sort and sift. If we struggle persistently with words and their limitations, we might end up becoming poets or mystics or philosophers, but still the way that language shapes our consciousness dominates our lives.
What struck me when reading John Redden's "Letter" from the editor's desk in the Canadian Journal of Herbalism XXV (2) with its eloquent description of the import of the fairly recent field of psychoneuroimmunology was his opening of the door beyond the linguistic compartments into which we categorize aspects of our human orgnaism. At least now, Western models of medicine can comfortably conceptualize linkages between organs and "systems" (cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, limbic, digestive, and so on) usually treated as discrete entities. We now feel more in tune with talking about feedback loops between our conveniently labeled systems and their interactions with our psychological and emotional states. Candace Pert's book, Molecules of Emotion, was a groundbreaking account of her work in what became the new field of "PIN". Six years ago, a wizardly cybernetician friend by the name of Stafford Beer recommended that I read her book, and a quick search for "psychoneuroimmunology" on Google at one point recently yielded 28,300 sites. Doubtless these included a lot of duplications and dead-end references, not to mention hosts of book-floggers, but there was still enough verbiage incorporoating the new paradigm floating around to consume the most dedicated air-ware fanatic.
The site that led the list when I searched was for "The PsychoNeuroImmunology
Research Society" at http://www.pnirs.org/is, calling itself "an international organization for researchers in a number of scientific and medical disciplines, including pyschology, neurosciences, immunology, pharmacology, psychiatry, behavioral medicine, infectious diseases, and rheumatology, who are interested in interactions between the nervous system and the immune system, and the relationship between behavior and health." Rather a self-reflexicve feedback loop with more a splintering of categories than an actual breaking down of the tradional -ologies.
John's editorial in CJH took the paradigm even further by suggesting that herbalists have an important part to play by helping people to "weave people, science, nature and life into a tapestry that is evolving and sustaining."
I feel a need to push it further by saying: the tapestry is already there. Our species is -- has always been -- part of what gets called the feedback loop. It is still our human pattern of behaviour to say: WE will weave the tapestry. WE will take care of the forests. In other words: WE still see ourselves as separate, as caretakers, as stewards, as users, as researchers -- whatever the noun might be that we use to designate ourselves as the supreme beings, the experts, the fixers, when what might be needed more urgently is to begin to see how we as creatures fit into what we call the tapestry, how all the parts are already woven together, and then learn how to act or better yet "not act" in ways that do not rupture and ruin the whole.
The passage in the Suzuki/Grady book that struck me with awe, is a description of Donald Culross Peattie's work in the lab (more than a half-century ago now) to understand chlorophyll -- the life-blood of so much of the plant world -- and to synthesize it. What he discovered was that the resulting green substance was not only in feel and appearance the very replica albeit differently coloured of human blood, but that its chemical composition differed from human blood by one crucial element particular to each. This may be old hat to a biochemist, but for a reader with a sense of kinship with non-human life forms, the implications are resounding and far more concrete than metaphor. When I locate my copy of the book, I'll revisit the passage, try to recapture the impact it had on first reading, and just let the image sink in all over again.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
"the world is not a mindless factory . . . ."
. . . as I read just now, happenstance, in Stephen Harrod Buhner's most recent book, The Secret Teachings of Plants: the intelligence of the the heart in the direct perception of nature. It's heartening to read Buhner's particular insights into being human creatures in a world that we didn't originally make but are determined to clutter with our artifice. And I note this phrase with its attendant irony as I sit at a sophisticated machine that captures my words electronically as the ambient climate is controlled by another electrical device that churns cooled air throughout the house. Outside my window the tall trees are waving in the afternoon breeze performing their age-old practice of cooling and purifying the air, and I realize that I would be more in tune with what they're doing by taking a pencil and a piece of paper out to the decrepit old picnic table out back and writing outside. I realize it will be cooler under the trees -- by as much as three or four degrees behind the house on this day of 31-degree (Celsius) heat, with humidity making the air feel like 38 degrees.
But then I might have to consider that act as being equally artificial: the manufactured pencil inscribing manufactured paper, from trees (white pine?) cut down -- probably clear cut -- to be ground into pulp to make the paper. I would also be far from the demands of the telephone, where I have promised to stand by in case I need to be consulted about some wording on plaques that are being created for a ceremony in early September, when four old trees are to be designated as Heritage Trees and protected as such. Moreover, I'm using my waiting time in the cool cloister of my indoor environment to sort through small hills of paper on my desk looking for notes scribbled during a telephone call barely more than a week ago in connection with a problem that a nearby community of people is having in their determination to save a community of mature trees from being cut down to create a new parking lot in their neighbourhood. My optimism about their efforts is tempered by having spent a day last week at hearings prompted by another neighbourhood group who have for about the past three years worked to prevent more than a hundred trees being sacrificed for a planned housing development that saw the trees as only an obstacle to construction, and the people in the community also as irritants. During the negotiations over the planned site, the developers went ahead (with the okay of a "community council" headed by an elected municipal representative) and removed virtually all of the trees in question. This hearing was in effect a post mortem and there was a case to be made about the process that had made such an act possible. The lawyer for the developers, in her questioning of an arborist of renown who had donated his time to make a presentation on behalf of the community folk, had actually stated (with an emphatic shrug of her shoulders): "surely the trees that were cut down would have died anyway." She suggested that if people wanted trees, they could always go to a park to see them.
Inside my head, the lines from Joni Mitchell's song: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? Paved paradise, put up a parking lot." Amen.
Have to say this for humans: stubborn. On both sides -- pro-tree, and anti-tree.
Intermittently I search the internet for stories concerning trees from different cultures because of my sense of the importance of people hearing stories about the planet that have the power to connect us to the world beyond our artifice, person to person, and person to place, using language with its capacity to spark imagination and enchant both listener and teller. Taking stories to heart for transmission by speech to the ears and hearts of others, stories often found in old folklore or legend and taken internally, like nourishment, like medicine for what ails us, for
What we are seeing is not in fact on the page, even though it appears to be there.
-- Henri Bortoft (in Buhner)
But then I might have to consider that act as being equally artificial: the manufactured pencil inscribing manufactured paper, from trees (white pine?) cut down -- probably clear cut -- to be ground into pulp to make the paper. I would also be far from the demands of the telephone, where I have promised to stand by in case I need to be consulted about some wording on plaques that are being created for a ceremony in early September, when four old trees are to be designated as Heritage Trees and protected as such. Moreover, I'm using my waiting time in the cool cloister of my indoor environment to sort through small hills of paper on my desk looking for notes scribbled during a telephone call barely more than a week ago in connection with a problem that a nearby community of people is having in their determination to save a community of mature trees from being cut down to create a new parking lot in their neighbourhood. My optimism about their efforts is tempered by having spent a day last week at hearings prompted by another neighbourhood group who have for about the past three years worked to prevent more than a hundred trees being sacrificed for a planned housing development that saw the trees as only an obstacle to construction, and the people in the community also as irritants. During the negotiations over the planned site, the developers went ahead (with the okay of a "community council" headed by an elected municipal representative) and removed virtually all of the trees in question. This hearing was in effect a post mortem and there was a case to be made about the process that had made such an act possible. The lawyer for the developers, in her questioning of an arborist of renown who had donated his time to make a presentation on behalf of the community folk, had actually stated (with an emphatic shrug of her shoulders): "surely the trees that were cut down would have died anyway." She suggested that if people wanted trees, they could always go to a park to see them.
Inside my head, the lines from Joni Mitchell's song: "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? Paved paradise, put up a parking lot." Amen.
Have to say this for humans: stubborn. On both sides -- pro-tree, and anti-tree.
Intermittently I search the internet for stories concerning trees from different cultures because of my sense of the importance of people hearing stories about the planet that have the power to connect us to the world beyond our artifice, person to person, and person to place, using language with its capacity to spark imagination and enchant both listener and teller. Taking stories to heart for transmission by speech to the ears and hearts of others, stories often found in old folklore or legend and taken internally, like nourishment, like medicine for what ails us, for
What we are seeing is not in fact on the page, even though it appears to be there.
-- Henri Bortoft (in Buhner)
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