Arts and Culture

PURPOSE: Bioregionalism is about making community and living in balance with eco-community, an endeavor that is in itself an art. Additionally, the arts – in bioregionalism and in all cultures and history – show us who we are, and how we can live. This page is offered as a gathering place for sharing bioregional arts that help us learn more about how to live in our home places, with one another in sustainable and sustaining community, and in growing awareness of the earth, sky and more-than-human life forms around us.

Annotated Bibliography on Bioregionalism by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg   (120K Word document)

FUTURE PLANS FOR THIS SITE: We would like to eventually feature bioregional poetry, prose; photographs of art, dance and other forms of the arts; and links to music and video. Our hope is to one day offer material in the four most prominent language of the hemisphere: Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French.
Please send all potential writing and arts to: click here

In Response to a Question

The earth says have a place, be what that place
requires; hear the sound the birds imply
and see as deep as ridges go behind
each other. (Some people call their scenery flat,
their only picture framed by what they know:
I think around them rise a riches and a loss
too equal for their chart – but absolutely tall.)

The earth says every summer have a ranch
that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape
that proclaims a universe – sermon
of the hills, hallelujah mountain,
highway guided by the way the world is tilted,
reduplication of mirage, flat evening:
a kind of ritual for the wavering.

The earth says where you live wear the kind
of color that your life is (gray shirt for me)
and by listening with the same bowed head that sings
draw all into one song, joining
the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy
way, the rage without met by the wings
within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.

Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.
-- William Stafford
(from Stories That Could Be True, for educational purposes only)

Planting Initiation Song
an Osage Women’s Initiation Song

I have made a footprint, a sacred one.
I have made a footprint, through it the blades push upward.
I have made a footprint, through it the blades radiate.
I have made a footprint, over it the blades float in the wind.
I have made a footprint, over it I bend the stalk to pluck the ears.
I have made a footprint, over it the blossoms lie gray.
I have made a footprint, smoke arises from my house.
I have made a footprint, there is cheer in my house.
I have made a footprint, I live in the light of day.

(from Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. by Jane Hirshfield, for educational purposes only)

Place

Is it the eagles returning to Lecompton, Old Eagle Town,
that stretch of lookout cottonwoods on the Kaw River,

or is it those rivers we measure towns by,
where we wait for flood and drought tides?

Or finding my grandfather during a storm,
clouds and lightning and his face by the window?

Is it the house I grew up in,
the way sun slanted through the front window,
warm bars of winter dust and light?

Is it a locus inside a muddy muscle,
the heart squeezing rivulets of bloods
again, again, again?
-- Denise Low

(from Spring Geese, for educational purposes only)

Epicurian Simplicity and Stephanie Mills: An Excerpt

Stephanie Mills, in addition to being a long-time founder and participant in bioregional congresses, is author of many articles and many fine and life-changing books, including: In Service to the Wild, Whatever Happened to Ecology?, Turning Away from Technology, and In Praise of Nature. She lives in the Great Lakes Bioregion in the Upper Midwest, and speaks and writes on all manner of issues related to ecology and social change. She was also named by Utne Reader in 1996 as one of the world’s leading visionaries.

from “Prelude”
The air seems to be vital tissue this morning, entirely alive with mayflies and countless other insects darting or arising in the sunlight, with airborne cherry petals marking the direction of the breeze and of gravity. The chirping of crickets merges into a soft, ubiquitous jingle. The spring air is their sounding board; the whole country is their guitar. Then there’s birdsong, certain presences announcing themselves. Four and twenty blackbirds are chucking and chucking. Jays are dipping low through the pine branches. A mourning dove is cooing. A starling is giving its raffish wolf whistle. Some goldfinches, among them a male with an unusual black eye mask, drop by to investigate the hummingbird feeder. The sky is washed in blue. The breezes are sweet, moist, and cool. What more do I need to know of heaven? Life is the absolute. Today the whole of existence feels like a gift.

from “Autumn”
To live in a seasonal climate is always to be facing change and often to be carping about it, protesting the revolving, discomforts, a little uneasy with the implications of time’s passage. It is equally to be confronted by the grand symbolism of the stately turning round of the year. Here, the trees strongly body forth the seasons. In the woods most vividly, every year is an allegory of life’s changes. Spring in its infancy, summer its flaming youth, autumn its maturity and fulfillment, winter in its ebbing, the end that contains the beginning. It’s as foolish to prefer one season above all the rest as it is to hold a preference for a certain time of life. I notice that whatever season we’re in is usually my favorite. Perhaps that’s an autumnal mind-set.

Although the Sonoran Desert, bioregion of my childhood, is a realm where cacti, not trees, are the charismatic megaflora, Phoenix had watered itself into oasishood, and the yards in our suburb had trees big enough to bond with. The native saguaros, chollas, octillos, mesquites, barrel cacti, and paloverdes were mostly to be seen on the rapidly receding outskirts of town or in date-palm pastiche desert-style landscapes at the old Scottsdale and Paradise Valley resorts. The desert and its cacti were with some justification regarded as hostile; park-like yards with lawns and elms were the conventional habitat of Anglo-American families such as mine.

In the yard next door, there were leafy chinaberry trees where our little gang of kids could clamber into the cool shade. Behind the subdivision was a citrus orchard. With their low, smooth, elephantine branches, the grapefruit trees were friendly to small climbers. My family’s yard had eucalyptus trees that were worthless for climbing but impressively tall, and shading the west side of the house were American elms. The elms’ lowest branches were too high for a little girl to reach but made a good bandstand for the mockingbirds.

Like any healthy, normal young primate, I became intimately acquainted with trees, if not forests, during my childhood. As most of us do, I outgrew that intimacy. As a young adult, my feeling for trees persisted but became a rhetorical relationship. Trees, especially redwoods, along with all the other conspicuous features of the earth’s imperiled ecosystems – sequoias, bristlecone pines, condors, gray whales, snail darters, Furbish’s louseworts – became objects of my general concern. Before the timber wars got going in earnest, I had left northern California. Now, courageous acts of civil disobedience have become a way of life for hundreds of human beings whose relationship with redwood trees and old-growth forests goes beyond rhetoric to a sacrifice of their days, their flesh, and even their lives.

In the mid-1980s, when I moved to the North Woods, I came to a landscape that had been logged repeatedly and yet still grew trees. Dwindling tracts of second- and third-growth hardwoods, mixes of sugar maple, beech, bass, ironwood, ash, poplar, yellow birch, red oak, and hemlock, persist in different combinations and proportions, depending on soil and slope. There are a few white and red pines and white birches here and there, and near wetlands and flowing water, different forest communities: cedar, fir, spruce, and tamarack. Some ecologists are saying that the combined stresses of acid rain, drought, insects, disease and genetic impoverishment that results from cutting the best trees for the market may not be survivable by the forests, despite their current appearance.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, much of this land was cut over and kept cleared. Now it grows corn and hay and golf courses. The uplands are good for growing cherries and other fruit, and for sitting half-million-dollar trophy homes on with views. Then there’s all-but-defeated land such as mine, which was farmed to the limit. In our glacial terrain, the limit was reached after a few crops of potatoes, and the soil began to blow. Now it’s parked under pine plantations, where Christmas trees and timber are raised as crops. On my acres, the Christmas trees have been left to their own devices and have grown tall and gnarly, shading and sheltering numerous hopeful cherry, maple, and beech saplings. Our local mosaic of second-, third-, and fourth-growth woodlots, orchards, suburbs, woodburbs, oat fields, and cornfields is picturesque but lacks ecological integrity. None of it adds up to forest, but the robust remnants of the real thing are beautiful for now.

When autumn comes to these woods, the green alchemist chlorophyll, having worked with earth, air, light, and water to grow the trees through spring and summer, ceases its labors. Then every single leaf reveals some different color, pattern, and intensity of pigmentation, going from green to gaudy. There’s a spectacle wherever there’s a patch of hardwoods. The sugar maple’s eye-dazzling range, from plangent yellow to blazing orange and gleaming ruby, makes that tree’s transformations the dominant feature of this most scenic season. After fifteen years of gaping at the sugar maples’ leaves, I have begun to see past them to the other trees in the forest and their less insistent but no less beautiful hues. The fall colors of the white ash’s compound leaves grade from butter yellow to garnet and burgundy, deep radiant tones that quietly invite the eye’s appreciation. Pien cherry leaves are among the earliest to turn and glow deeply as embers. Hope hornbeams and basswoods range from chrome yellow to citron. Beech leaves phase through sunny yellow on their way to paper-bag brown.

The sugar maple’s millennia of upstaging the rest of the fall foliage may be coming to an end. Acid rain threatens these trees, and global climate change may drive their range northward. Whether the trees themselves will be able to migrate as quickly as the weather changes remains to be seen. The Asian longhorn beetle, an alien invasive species recently established in the United States thanks to the expansion of world trade, having arrived in the wood of crates containing goods from China, is likely to infest and decimate this tree species unless unprecedentedly successful vigilance against the beetle’s spread is undertaken and maintained. The sugar maple’s fellow dominant in these woodlands, the American beech, is even more immediately imperiled. Beech bark disease may eliminate as many as half of the beech trees. The possibility that the beeches and sugar maples could all but vanish from the woods, as did the American chestnuts and elms, which succumbed to alien organisms, signals change of quite a different kind from the movement of the seasons and their variation from year to year. These shocking final changes confront us everywhere these days, asking insistently, “How are we to live?” and “What are we to do?”

If we live simply, attentively, and gratefully, it will go better. There is always beauty to see if you have an eye for it. Looking is a practice. Seeing is a gift that comes with practice. The light is autumn is so rich, warm, and romantic, tinted with all the bright colors of the land. Did it rejoice the hearts and souls of the old-times who lived here, engaged in subsistence farming? Were they amazed, grateful? And how did this glowing atmosphere with its rustle and snap strike the Odawa people, when the trees were many and great and the woods offered meat, furs, and medicine and the dangers of wolves and bears? Has it always been a great wonder to be here as the seasons hasten along, and has it always been a vexation to fend with the whipsaw weather that is fall?

Writing from the Earth
A Writing Workshop about Place

Ground Rules for Writing Workshops

1. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, and most of all, making sense.

2. Write what you know as well as what you don’t know.

3. Follow your writing, not the suggested exercise, the facilitator or what you think you should write. Write what wakes you up the most.

4. Feel free to experiment with poems, stories, dialogues, essays, letters, and whatever other form the writing wants to be.

5. Practice trust. Trust yourself to write what you need to write, how you need to write it.

6. Remember that all revealed in this workshop is confidential.

7. Treat all newborn writing with great respect and tenderness so that it can grow.

8. Reading your writing aloud is always optional.

9. No self-deprecating remarks allowed (especially when preparing to read your work).

10. Strive, as much as possible, not to compare your writing with the writing of others, and not to critique, interpret or analyze away what your writing is trying to show you.

11. Witness others. Listen carefully with your full attention. It will enhance your ability to listen to your own words.

12. Please share your responses to one another’s work—what moves you, what stands out for you – but please refrain from critiquing or analyzing the work.

13. Treat all you do as a delicious and invigorating experiment. Play. Take chances. See what way leads to way, and what words lead to words.

Some Considerations

REINHABITING, RESTORING/RESTORYING, RECIPROCITY
In writing about our connection to place and places, inside and around us, we can do three vital things that help us cultivate a life of connection and awareness: We can use our writing to REINHABIT our home places more fully; We can practice the art of cultural and personal RESTORATION through the arts; and we can foster a greater sense of RECIPROCITY between our individual selves and the living life.

REINHABITION: Peter Berg, one of the key founders of bioregionalism, writes:
If the life-destructive path of technological society is to diverted into life- sustaining directions, the land must be reinhabited. Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life- supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it. Simply stated it involved becoming fully alive in and with a place.
By writing our way toward reinhabiting our bodies – which are our personal piece of the earth – as well as our home communities, we can become more “fully alive in and with a place.”

RESTORATION: Stephanie Mills writes,
In the land we may find solace for our wounds, privacy for a developing intimacy with a natural surround, an occasion for acting out healing processes that effect inner healing as well; or we may remain unconscious of and oblivious to the living community of the land. Numbed and paralyzed by the degree of damage that has been inflicted on the land, we may be domineering and exploitive toward it, or even blindly destructive. Our behavior toward the land is an eloquent and detailed expression of our character, and the land is not incapable of reflecting these statements back. We are perfectly bespoken by our surroundings. Imagine a world where the life of the Earth and of the human spirit could go on, evolving, diversifying, adapting, changing, and surprising, fearlessly: if it can be imagined, it can come to be. If it can be recalled, it may be restored.
Drawing upon our imagination and our memory, we can help recall “the life of the Earth and of the human spirit,” which is the key to restoring and sustaining the earth, as Mills so eloquently explains.

RECIPROCITY: David Abram writes,
0ur bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth – our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn those other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
Writing in a directed way – our eyes and ears and all our senses aimed toward the natural world – is a way for us to more consciously experience the reciprocal relationships we have with the “animate earth.” Using our words – and reinhabiting our own language arts – can help us come to our senses.

Poetry as powerful means of using our senses because that’s how poetry works: it
evokes sensory experience that wakes us up and brings us into the place of the poem. As Abram also reminds us,
A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.

Language can help us connect with what’s beyond language: As Tomas Transtomer writes,

Tired of all who come with words, word but no language
I went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I come across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow.
Language, but no words.

As Bruce Chatwin states, “An unsung land is a dead land.” The same is true for us: we know that all kinds of health problems – physical, emotional, psychic, mental – are soothed and sometimes even healed by being able to transform what we feel through telling our story, through being witnessed, and through the very life-giving act of merely making art. We must, and we can, sing ourselves in poetry, and sing the earth. Think of the Aborigines – the way each place has a song. Listen to the places in yourself, and what song those places sing to you and for you.

Exercises

For all these exercises, give yourself (and pals) 10-20 minutes to simply write, and see what comes. If you’re with others, you can take turns reading aloud, and/or speaking about your experience writing, or you can always say, “pass.” These exercises may be especially effective at helping local groups to develop a bioregional presentation to share with others in their community and beyond.

1. After reading the poem below, write your own myth-poem starting with “In the very earliest time…” about where you life.

Magic Words

In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen –
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That’s the way it was.
-- Translated from the Inuit by Edward Field
(for educational purposes only)

2. What does the earth say to you?

In Response to a Question

The earth says have a place, be what that place
requires; hear the sound the birds imply
and see as deep as ridges go behind
each other. (Some people call their scenery flat,
their only picture framed by what they know:
I think around them rise a riches and a loss
too equal for their chart – but absolutely tall.)

The earth says every summer have a ranch
that’s minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape
that proclaims a universe – sermon
of the hills, hallelujah mountain,
highway guided by the way the world is tilted,
reduplication of mirage, flat evening:
a kind of ritual for the wavering.

The earth says where you live wear the kind
of color that your life is (gray shirt for me)
and by listening with the same bowed head that sings
draw all into one song, joining
the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy
way, the rage without met by the wings
within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.

Listening, I think that’s what the earth says.
-- William Stafford

(from Stories That Could Be True, for educational purposes only)

3. Make a list of dappled things, and then join them together in your writing.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
-- Gerald Manley Hopkins

(from Norton Anthology of Poetry, for educational purposes only)

4. Take the repeated phrases and unfold them in your experience……for example, “May be it beautiful before me in……” or “I am restored in beauty by….”

Dark young pine, at the center of the earth originating,
I have made your sacrifice.
Whiteshell, turquoise, abalone beautiful,
Jet beautiful, fool’s gold beautiful, blue pollen beautiful,
reed pollen, pollen beautiful, your sacrifice I have made.
This day your child I have become, I say.

Watch over me.
Hold your hand before me in protection.
Stand guard for me, speak in defense of me.
As I speak for you, speak for me.
As you speak for me, so will I speak for you.
May it be beautiful before me,
May it be beautiful behind me,
May it be beautiful below me,
May it be beautiful above me,
May it be beautiful all around me.

I am restored in beauty.
I am restored in beauty.
I am restored in beauty.
I am restored in beauty
-- traditional Navajo prayer,
recorded by Gladys A. Reichard

(from Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. by Jane Hirshfield, for educational purposes only)

5. Use the phrase, “I have made a footprint,” or any other phrase that pops into your mind, and write it over and over, adding what comes from it each time. Or write your own initiation song for something important in your life.

Planting Initiation Song

an Osage Women’s Initiation Song

I have made a footprint, a sacred one.
I have made a footprint, through it the blades push upward.
I have made a footprint, through it the blades radiate.
I have made a footprint, over it the blades float in the wind.
I have made a footprint, over it I bend the stalk to pluck the ears.
I have made a footprint, over it the blossoms lie gray.
I have made a footprint, smoke arises from my house.
I have made a footprint, there is cheer in my house.
I have made a footprint, I live in the light of day.

(from Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. by Jane Hirshfield, for educational purposes only)

5. List all the ways water is precious in your life, and then link these images and stories together in a piece of writing.

Starwater

Nursing my first baby
I drank eight glasses of water,
two quarts each day. He grew.

I felt like a carrier for water,
passing it on through to the child,
and some day his child, too,
will fatten, remarkable
like peaches and muskmelons
leaching juice from bare dirt.

Astronomers tell us star dust
once swirled together,
cooled into rocks and water
and still circulates,
the same matter pulled into stars
and Earth and into our flesh.

So water travels the skies,
stretches into clouds,
and falls, moving over East,
circling, the same ancient water
caught in the whirlwind
binding us together –
gravity, or maybe as we know it,
love, or water drawing together
all its kin.
-- Denise Low

(from Starwater, for educational purposes only)

6. Write your own list of questions about what place is to you.

Place

Is it the eagles returning to Lecompton, Old Eagle Town,
that stretch of lookout cottonwoods on the Kaw River,

or is it those rivers we measure towns by,
where we wait for flood and drought tides?

Or finding my grandfather during a storm,
clouds and lightning and his face by the window?

Is it the house I grew up in,
the way sun slanted through the front window,
warm bars of winter dust and light?

Is it a locus inside a muddy muscle,
the heart squeezing rivulets of bloods
again, again, again?
-- Denise Low

(from Spring Geese, for educational purposes only)

7. Write about what’s composting in your mind….or heart.

On Top

All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over turn it over
wait and water down.
From the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through, sift down
even.
Watch it sprout.

A mind like compost.
-- Gary Synder

(from Axe Handles, for educational purposes only)

8. Write your own pledge of allegiance.

For All

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance.

I pledge alliance to the soil
of Turtle Island
and to the begins who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.
-- Gary Synder

(from Axe Handles, for educational purposes only)

9. Simply read this poem aloud, outside….and then see what you have to say.

The Family is All There Is

Think of those old, enduring connections
found in all flesh – the channeling
wires and threads, vacuoles, granules,
plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending
boles and coral sapwood (sugar-
and light-filled), those common ligaments,
filaments, fibers and canals.

Seminal to all kin also is the open
mouth – in heart urchin and octopus belly,
in catfish, moonfish, in thirsty magpie,
wailing cat cub, barker, yodeler,
yawning coati.

And there is pervasive clasping
common to the clan – the hard nails
of lichen and ivy sucker
on the church wall, the bean tendril
and the taproot, the bolted coupling
of crane flies, the hold of the shearwater
on its morning squid, guanine
to cytosine, adenine to thymine,
fingers around fingers, the grip
of the voice on presence, the grasp
of the self on place.

Remember the same hair on pygmy
dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar,
covering red baboon, thistle seed
and willow herb? Remember the similar
snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose
and sumo wrestler? Remember the familiar
whinny and shimmer found in river birches,
bay mares and bullfrog tadpoles,
in children playing at shoulder tag
on a summer lawn?

The family – weavers, reachers, winders
and connivers, pumpers, runners, air
and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders,
wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators –all
brothers, sisters, all there is.

Name something else.
-- Pattiann Rogers

(from Splitting and Binding, for educational purposes only)

10. You guessed it. Roll on the ground, preferably naked (and wisely not in Kansas during chigger season), and then write.

Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew

Out among the wet grasses and wild barley-covered
Meadows, backside, frontside, through the white clover
And feather peabush, over spongy tussocks
And shaggy-mane mushrooms, the abandoned nests
Of larks and bobolinks, face to face
With vole trails, snail niches, jelly
Slug eggs; or in a stone-walled garden, level
With the stemmed bulbs of orange and scarlet tulips,
Cricket carcasses, the bent blossoms of sweet William,
Shoulder over shoulder, leg over leg, clear
To the ferny edge of the goldfish pond – some people
Believe in the rejuvenating powers of this act – naked
As a toad in the forest, belly and hips, thighs
And ankles drenched in the dew-filled gulches
Of oak leaves, in the soft fall beneath yellow birches,
All of the skin exposed directly to the killy cry
Of the kingbird, the buzzing of the grasshopper sparrows,
Those calls merging with the dawn-red mists
Of crimson steeplebush, entering the bare body then
Not merely through the ears but through the skin
Of every naked person willing every event and potentiality
Of a damp transforming dawn to enter.

Lillie Langtry practiced it, when weather permitted.
Lying down naked every morning in the dew,
With all of her beauty believing the single petal
Of her white skin could absorb and assume
That radiating purity of liquid and light.
And I admit to believing myself, without question,
In the magical powers of dew on the cheeks
And breasts of Lillie Langtry believing devotedly
In the magical powers of morning dew on the skin
Of her body lolling purple beds of bird’s-foot violets,
Pink prairie mimosa. And I believe, without a doubt
In the mystery of the healing energy coming
From that wholehearted belief in the beneficent results
Of the good delights of the naked body rolling
And rolling through the silked and sun-filled,
Dusky-winged, sheathed and sparkled, looped
And dizzied effluences of each dawn
Of the rolling earth.

Just consider how the mere idea of it alone
Has already caused me to sing and sing
This whole morning long.
-- Pattiann Rogers

(from Splitting and Binding, for educational purposes only)

11. Write your own manifesto. Or write how you “practice resurrection.”

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. You mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forst
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humu
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please power more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the field.
Lie easily in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
-- Wendell Berry

(from The Country of Marriage, for educational purposes only)

12. What saves you in this big world?

Grace Abounding

Air crowds into my cell so considerably
that the jailer forgets this kind of gift
and thinks I’m alone. Such unnoticed largesse
smuggled by day floods over me,
or here come grass, turns in the road,
a branch or stone significantly strewn
where it wouldn’t need to be.

Such times abide for a pilgrim, who all through
a story or a life may live in grace, that blind
benevolent side of even the fiercest world,
and might – even in oppression or neglect –
not care if it’s friend or enemy, caught up
in a dance where no one feels need or fear:

I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen
friends, or times when only a glance
from a passenger beside me, or just the tired
branch of a willow inclining toward earth,
may teach me how to join earth and sky.

(from Even in Quiet Places, for educational purposes only)

IMPORTANT BOOKS ABOUT THE EARTH AND LANGUAGE

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-
Human World. New York: Pantheon, 1996.

Andruss, Van, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, eds. Home!
A Bioregional Reader. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990.

Gaston Bachelard. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.

Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. London: Penguin Books, 1987.

Elder, John and Hertha Wong, eds. Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales of Nature
From around the World. Boston: Beacon Press

Griffin, Susan. Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. Sierra Club Books,
2000.

Guss, David M., ed. The Language of the Birds. San Francisco: North Point Press,
1985.

Jones, Edwin. Reading the Book of Nature. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989.

Macy, Joanna. World as Lover, World as Self. Parallax Press, 1991.

McLuhan, T.C. Touch the Earth. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1971.

Orr, David. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World.
Albany, NY:P State University of New York Press, 1992.

Roszak, Theodore. Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. Sierra
Club Books, 1995.

Sanders, Scott Russell. Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Boston:
Beacon Press.

Sauer, Peter, ed. Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

Seed, John, et. al. Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings. New
Society Publishers, 1988.

Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and
Image. New York: Penguin Press, 1999.

Snyder, Gary. Practice of the Wild: Essays. North Point Press, 1990.

Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

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