The Power of Place

East Inlet

At 6 a.m. the East Inlet waters are still. Mist hovers and then disappears into the morning sun.  A family of loons fishes the length of the waterway, while I drift nearby and watch the adults teach their young to dive and how to strengthen their wings for the coming migration to the sea.

In early September, the water grasses and wild rice go to seed.  The geese fly in the characteristic V and hawks circle overhead, soaring on thermals and gathering for their own change of place.

It's the end of a long, hot, dry summer and the beginning of a transition time for me.  As a teaching/testing consultant, I begin a new school year.  As a partner, I celebrate a wedding anniversary.  As a writer, I dance the dance with time, responsibilities, and the stories that spill out of dreams, conversations, experiences, glimpsed moments and vistas, memories, and all those other places where the words + images abide.

But first, we make a pilgrimage to the East Inlet in far northern New Hampshire, just a few miles below the border with Canada, where The Nature Conservancy maintains the Connecticut Lakes Natural Reserve.

We've been coming here for 25 years, and yet it feels timeless -- the smells, the surrounding firs, the backdrop of mountains and sky, the rising and setting sun, the quiet.  It still feels remote, a place where we see moose, deer, fox, coyote, osprey, ducks, heron, hawks, otters, turtles and loons.

To my great relief I am a very different person, today.  My kayak lifts gently from the beach into the dark water.  I hear crows, a woodpecker, a loon's call.  A belted kingfisher hurls himself from a far branch and spears a minnow.  The sun breaks through the clouds in its promise of another warm day.

Over the week, I will gather strength for my own migration south.  I'll settle into the season and meet whatever it brings to my life and surroundings, knowing I can return to this source again and again. This is why we need protected places in our world, sanctuaries, reserves where nature can be nature 

in all its glory and grand indifference.

The End of the Summer Institute

Robert Frost, Poet

We've come to the end of the Plymouth Writing Project Five-Week Summer Institute.  It was a brilliant experience.  We arrive as individual teachers and leave as a collaborative force.  We've laughed and cried, listened hard and worked even harder.  We have written thousands of words, hundreds of stories.

We've shared our teaching, our research, our thoughts and our teacher hearts.  I wrote: 

 There is a myth of the isolated writer, locked into himself/herself, door closed where he/she fights dragons and demons, alone.

But the experiences I am having in the writing project have exploded the myth -- blown a hole smack through the wall that separates writer from writer, artists from artists, the writer-me from myself.

The Writing Marathon at Dartmouth College was so much fun and so deep and so, so collaborative.   I loved the writing task:  Find a sculpture.  Observe closely.  Ask yourself questions.  Write and share.  I love the rituals.  Introduce yourself and say, "I am a writer."

At the end of the reading, your companions say, "Thank you."  No comments.  No critique.  Just simple gratitude:  "Thank you for sharing your world with us".

Outside the Rounds Building where our classes are held, there is a bronze sculpture of the poet Robert Frost to honor his teaching time at Plymouth State University and his legacy of words, images and New England thinking.  I remember watching him read his poem for John F. Kennedy's Inauguration as President of the United States, January 1961.

It was very cold that day.  The sun was so bright, Frost found it hard to read from his paper.  I was fourteen years old, witnessing the giants of history on a black and white television screen. 

I remind Frost of this whenever I pass him at his bench.

Obama's High-Stakes Teacher Bashing - COLORLINES

Read the full article on:  http://colorlines.com/archives/2

Never, never did I expect to be facing this kind of attack on teachers from this President.  I do not support Race to the Top.  My lifework has been as a testing specialist, mainly with special needs students.  I started in 1975, so I feel I am a "credible witness" to the damage inherent in "standardized" testing.

There is a place for reflection, assessment, and evaluation, but it's not this punitive, controlled and utterly political agenda that started with No Child Left Behind.  I can tell you we are leaving a generation of children behind.  No question.

We need to humanize our schools, not turn them into narrow-minded and competitive entities. Our children's learning depends on all society.  Support your teachers, especially the good ones.  Keep the special programs -- art, music, sports, drama -- especially in public schools!  Those people who put their children into private schools will have all those opportunities -- increasing the gap between the rich and the poor and the rest of us in the middle.

Good teaching, good parenting, good governing depends on collaboration.  We need to share good ideas and practices, not hold back and compete against other schools, other colleagues.

The corporate world does not create good teachers or good education.  Their goals are not "for the good of the public".

Bottom line:  Who controls education, controls the culture.  Ever wonder how much money these corporate testing companies make?   A lot.

Earth Day 2010

In the tropical rainforests of Costa Rica, I sit surrounded by green.  Even the air I breathe is green.  The shadows reflected in Dante Creek shimmer like emeralds.  The mosses, ferns and smooth waxy leaves wrap me in colors that have more shades of green that I have words.

I am here in the tropical lowland rainforest on the southern Pacific coast of Costa Rica to honor Earth Day.  For me, this is the Source, the Garden, a place rich and lush with life.  

Everywhere, we witness big and small miracles unfolding -- fronds of a new fern, macaws pairing for life, a hummingbird's tiny nest wrapped in lichen and spiderwebs.  

Over eleven years, I have returned to this place, and time and time again discovered something new, something fantastic, some part of the natural world I could never have imagined -- only experienced.  

This year, in late April, we walk the beach path at Corcovado National Park and listen to a din of low repetitive calls.  Not birds.  Not mammals.  Frogs.  Costa Rican Gliding tree frogs have parachuted into a small swamp to lay eggs in their short, frenzied mating.  We watch lime green-colored frogs with huge orangey webbed feet launch themselves from trees and glide, limbs outstretched, to land near the larger females.

For hours, they leap and mate.  Eggs, like luminescent pearls, line the leaves and tree bark.  Later, I read how the tadpoles hatch from these eggs and slither into the water just below.  They are, of course, a species threatened by habitat loss.

Gliding tree frogs

Corcovado National Park

Costa Rica

That's the other message of this 40th anniversary of Earth Day:  LOSS.  

Loss of habitat and diversity.  Species lost, forever.  Loss of respect and connection to the natural world.  Loss of awe and reverence for life.  No more trust in engineers, politicians, words and vows.  

Humans are the only species who destroy where they live and foul resources they must have to survive -- like clean water and unpolluted food supplies.

I write this blog 26 days since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  That's 26 days of oil spewing, unchecked, into the ocean -- and there is no known way to stop it.  The "experts" flail, point fingers and whine.  "Well, it's not that bad..."

The oil companies, regulators, designers and builders have lied endlessly and profited from their deceit.  They have no way to stop this oil.  Now, they want to spread offshore drilling into the Arctic and off the eastern seaboard.  What mockery.  What utter contempt for anything living -- people, plankton, fish, coral.   The ocean?

There's a big price to pay for this explosion -- and it's not going to be satisfied by any currency or BP's gesture of throwing dollars at a few states.

The real price will be exacted by the same force that creates 100-foot trees, laden with bromeliads, mosses, entire ecosystems from root to crown.  This same force drives frogs to glide and salmon to hurl themselves back to original spawning streams.  

It's the force of volcanic ash from Iceland, Java, Hawaii.  This force can shift tectonic plates and change everything in nine seconds or less.   Even the oil gushing from that broken pipe driven deep into the ocean floor belongs to this life force -- not to us, not to the puny humans.  

The sooner we learn our place in the natural world, the better it will be for everything living or not.

Think Twice Before You Draw

At 5:45 a.m. I catch the end of the BBC WORLD NEWS UPDATE - on Vermont Public Radio 89.5 FM. A few weeks ago they aired "The Gunfighters' Dilemma" -- my favorite kind of story where popular belief gets turned upside down and tied to higher-order principles and we all get to reflect on big issues.

It seems Danish physicist and Noble Laureate Niels Bohr used to take breaks from quantum physics + atomic bombs to watch cowboy movies. Being an alert and curious scholar, Bohr noticed that the first man to draw a gun in the inevitable showdown always died. This suited the moral high ground of good guys and bad guys in 1950's westerns, but it was also a puzzle to be solved by physicists and their graduate students.

Sure enough, after a series of carefully controlled lab gunfights, the gunslinger who drew first, died. It had to do with response time -- "reacting to your opponent's movement was significantly faster than the conscious decision to draw your own gun".

Professor Andrew Welchman studies reaction time and other brain function at the University of Birmingham, England. He conducted similar research with the same results. Draw second in a western-style gunfight and you win and live... maybe.

For a more practical application, he spoke about instinctive reaction and response time and how it plays out in life/death situations -- you jump to safety when the bus careens down the street at you. You don't stop to think, you react.

This talk of gunslingers brought me back to 1950's Saturday morning TV. Hopalong Cassidy. Roy Rogers. The Lone Ranger. We played cowboys and Indians, complete with fringed shirts, boots, hats and leather holsters with plastic guns. Later things got more complicated, as they do with age. Rawhide. Clint Eastwood and the "spaghetti westerns". Movies and life started to blur good guys and bad guys, but we still believed the popular logic that "first to draw, wins".

Then came 1963 and Kennedy's assassination. April 1968 and Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed. June 5, 1968: Robert Kennedy shot and killed. May 4, 1970: Kent State massacre where students were shot by the Ohio National Guard. All the while there was Vietnam and it didn't matter who shot first or second or third.

This litany of my coming-of-age pales in the light of today's guns and warfare and popular culture. I think we still believe the fastest gun -- the first to strike -- wins. Too bad we don't listen more carefully to our scientists and teachers and thinkers.

My vision: Put the two biggest warmongers (from countries, neighborhoods, whatever) face to face, each with a gun, and let them wait for the other to draw first. Then, maybe the rest of us will be able to live, thrive, and survive in peace.

Illustration by Frederic Remington, 1861-1909. "A Dash for the Timber".

Connecting the Dots

There's a lot of talk these days about "connecting-the-dots" as part of our national security. As every Kindergarten teacher knows, connect-the-dots is a timeless practice that teaches essential skills -- sequencing, step-by-step problem-solving, realizing consequences of a missed step, and enjoying the surprise of a finished image.

It's all about taking the single steps and building up to the Big Picture. Adults don't seem to value Big Picture Thinking these days. It's easier to fight about the small steps and go off on tangents. If we focus too much on details and don't look for those next connections, we can avoid lots of things -- Change, Responsibility, Moral Choices.

So, I'm interested in Big Picture Thinking and Connections. As part of this blog, I'd like to offer a dot to connect. Read this and ponder where the next dot might be waiting:

January 11, 2010: Today it is warmer in Montreal, Canada than it is in Florida, USA.

Carrying Water

Over the next few weeks, well-polished people will debate the state of our planet at the Copenhagen Summit. What climate change? Carbon offsets? Oil? Nuclear? Solar? What dance shall we do to fend off the truth and fool ourselves for yet another day or year or decade.

Meanwhile in eastern Africa, women carry water in containers strapped to their heads. It's important work. They walk to a place where they can find clean water and haul it back to their villages. These women know the value of a cup of clean water. The want of water hangs heavily on their necks and backs and in their hearts. It's etched into their foreheads by fiber straps. They feel its scarcity in hot winds that ravage their soil and weaken the cries of their children and animals.

These women should be at the table in Copenhagen; but they are too busy carrying water, too busy surviving. Copenhagen should go to them. Ease the straps from their backs. Dig wells with them. Carry water with them. Share the burden of a common survival -- you and I and the water-bearing women of this one earth.

Today is a Very Fine Day

I have been following a terrific blog, "No Telling", created by a writing project teacher named Monda who has a wicked sense of humor and a keen eye for irony. She makes me laugh, cry, and shake my head with her dead-on portrayals of life as a teacher and woman-of-a-certain-age. So I am happy and very gratified to be one of her Editor's Picks for the September Easystreet Carnival of Writing.

Writing is tricky business. Whenever I put pen to paper or, now fingers to keys, I lay open a bit of heart, soul, dreams and unintended warts. If then I share my writing, I take a big leap of faith and hope that somewhere, sometime what I have written will touch another person and create a spark of connection, interest, feeling, wonder...

It's like so much of life . We go about our days and have little sense of how we influence and touch other people. Every now and then, a student or parent from my past will send me a note to share a triumph or an update and I am so pleased to be once again reminded of my small part of this big world.

So, check out Easystreet Prompts at http://easystreetprompts.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-easy-street-carnival-of-writing.html

Enjoy the writing and bits of heart + soul you find there. And, know that there's one writer in New Hampshire who is feeling really fine today.

Somewhere above the Rio Madre de Dios

Southeast Peru. We're flying into Puerto Maldonado, a frontier city near the borders with Brazil and Bolivia. From there, we travel upriver by boat into the Tambopata National Reserve, a protected area that is part of the southern Amazon Basin. We have flown inland from Lima on the Pacific Coast, over the Andes Mountains to Cusco, and now south into the jungle.

From the air, I see vast stretches of green -- broken only by the winding rivers that feed the Amazon. There are animals and birds and even indigenous people who are rare, endangered, and specific to this region. But even as I revel in the strangeness and the beauty, I think about the changes coming from the east. A transoceanic highway is being built that will cross South America and link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The road will pass through Puerto Maldonado and open this area to trade, transport, malaria, people, and a more modern world.

Manifest destiny. I am completely cynical about the aims and outcome of this road, this progress. Who profits? Not the local people. Not the jaguar, nor the macaws nor the monkeys, nor the vast diversity of plants and animals of this region. Who stands up to the mining companies and the big oil and gas and lumber conglomerates? Who refuses the drug trade, the animal trade, the human trade?

Wanted: A new breed of human beings. A paradigm shift. A critical mass. A new definition and model of progress that improves more than it destroys. Needed immediately across the globe. Needed urgently in the tropical forests of South America. Matter of life and death.

Apply now.

Passion

This summer I taught a three week course, Writing Workshop for Teachers, as part of the Plymouth Writing Project. We do research as teachers of writing and present a teaching practice based on the research. In the afternoon, we write, respond to others writing, and explore ways to nurture ourselves and our students as writers. In the spirit of the National Writing Project and our Plymouth site, we all write and share together. It's a powerful model and it changes the way we teach - and write - and live.

For me this three weeks in July was simply the best teaching experience I have had over my 30-odd years in education. It's an amazing feeling and I find myself, a month later, still in awe. So, what was different?

We were a small, diverse group of educators. There were young people starting their careers with two or three years of teaching behind them. One woman was head of a university department in the Dominican Republic and she was responsible for improving instruction throughout her country. One woman was a long-time first grade teacher. I came to this group with years of special education testing, primary school teaching, and writing -- always writing. Part of our curriculum involved writing with the larger Summer Institute, students in the Writing Camps, and Pakistani educators attending a leadership seminar at PSU.

Over and over, I found our "small but mighty group" offered a Quality of Attention not possible in larger classrooms and bigger settings. We could go deeply into topics, follow tangents, and take time for reading + research. We talked and listened carefully and asked questions of one another. The ideas and opinions of the newest teachers were as valuable as the experiences of the veterans.

We built a place where it was safe to question, share and risk. No tests. No red pens. No dismissive put-downs. High standards supported by respect for the learner... and we're all learners in the end. One of us was able to share a personal writing piece. One of us changed the style of writing from reporting to storytelling. We wrote about our passions, our challenges, deep experiences and questions.

I learned a lot about myself as a teacher this summer. My teaching starts with the physical environment of the classroom. When I taught Kindergarten, I had centers for work + exploration. I brought in stuff for five-year-olds to taste and touch and mess with. I put posters at five-year-old eye level and watched to see who became interested. There were sticks chewed by beavers and puppets from different lands. Maps. Life-size footprints of elephants, giraffe, gorilla, babies.

I realized I do the same with adults -- put out books and photos, pictures and found objects. We had snacks and went outside on sunny days. We used writing prompts, questions, readings and teaching demonstrations. The physical environment feeds the intellectual environment and the lines blur, no matter the age. We're all in this learning-teaching-writing thing together.

As I think about my experiences this summer and over my years in education, I have a few things to say:

For the administrators, pundits, and policy-makers, I say: Trust your teachers. Encourage collaboration, not competition. Build opportunities where every teacher's voice is heard and valued. Be kind. Be fun. Be interested in what seems difficult or different.

For the current culture, I say: Testing is not teaching. Testing does not make us more human or thoughtful. Interaction does. Openness does. Understanding, listening, valuing, respecting another's experience does. This is the kind of learning that moves the world forward in positive and sustainable ways.

I know this because it happened to me this summer for three marvelous weeks in July. Deep teaching. Deep learning. Deep, compassionate listening and sharing. Writing deeply as a way of thinking and being.

My passion is right out there so everyone can see.

So, where are you in this passionate world?

A Path of One's Own

I've done some walking in the past. England. The Yorkshire Dales. We walked the old ways, over stiles and through farmers' fields, careful to latch the gates and skirt the cows. The footpaths led us from one small village of thatched houses and a pub to yet another and another.

Walking and walking. We bathed our faces and soaked our hats in an ancient spring. Here we found a "cloutie well", festooned with bits of bright cloth. Hang a rag at the cloutie well, and you heal yourself and others. So, we left a sock tied to a branch and traveled on, more secure, more protected.

Walking, walking. We walk history and the Freedom Trail. We walk the Mall in Washington. From Georgetown, we walk the old canal towpath to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, where once mules strained and pulled barges of cargo from Rocky Creek to Cumberland.

Home in the north, a path leads from our back door up to the summit of Hersey Mountain to a granite slab of a lookout. We hike by vernal pools, a seasonal brook, signs of moose and deer, old logging yards, and an abandoned cellar hole. We go back down, down to our own small woody house and hang our sticks by the door.

As I said, I've done some walking in the past.

Long before I had a driver's license, I walked. I walked to school and to the "Y". I walked to the library and to Aunt Mary's, on to the dentist and piano lessons.

I walked because I had to -- no one around to give me a ride. But, I also walked because I could. It was out of freedom. Stubborn pride. Independence.

Walking was personal. No one could take it away from me.

Memorial Day 2009

This Spring, I visited the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. for the first time. I went to honor young men I had known who had fought and died in that hell. I also wanted to acknowledge my own part in the protests and marches. It had been a time of huge upheaval, torment, and rage -- my own rage against an unjust war and an impersonal system that drafted my friends and haunted our futures.

I walked from the Capitol Building and kept the Washington Monument in my view. It was cherry blossom time -- a warm and beautiful April afternoon. The city was alive with visitors, student groups at the Smithsonian, and the homeless at Union Station.

For an hour I followed a path I had walked 42 years ago. In October 1967, I marched in Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War. We met at the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial and marched upon the Pentagon, where it was rumored Allen Ginsberg and a group of friends were planning to levitate the building.

I was with my friend Trish, in our tan trenchcoats, like the good journalism students we were. We had travelled all night on the bus from Syracuse. I was taking a first step in the long march that has become my life. I wanted to be counted -- against the war, against the military draft, against colonization and "manifest destiny" and all those other excuses we use for taking what we want, when and where we want it.

I marched for Jeff who had enlisted after losing his scholarship freshman year. I marched for Lenny and Mike and Johnny and Jim. I marched for what the draft did to young men and their families. I marched because I had been radicalized and I was furious at the betrayals in my life.

So, in April 2009, I retraced my steps along the Reflecting Pool and was caught by the irony of the Vietnam Memorial being placed just over the berm from where we had sung and yelled and beat our fists into the air. "One, two, three, four. We don't want your fucking war." Over and over and over.

Who could have imagined that 42 years later, I would return to open thick, waterproof books neatly printed with the 58,256 names of the dead. Who knew I would search and find two men from my youth -- Michael who teased me about my high school editorials and Johnny, my neighborhood friend from when I was five.

Michael was to die early, on May 24, 1968. Johnny -- and eleven other young men -- died on June 22, 1970. Their names are engraved side by side on the same row. There are coordinates on each panel so you can trace that one death, that one name, that date and your unique heartbreak amongst the thousands.

Who could known it would be so organized...

I started walking the path next to the polished black stone. First, I passed rows of names at the height of my ankle. I found Michael on a slab that reached my waist. Johnny was lost in waves of names on a stone far above my head. May 1968 to June 1970 was a bad time for young men aged 18 to 25.

An airforce veteran stood nearby and talked about his experiences. Most of these men, he said, were shot down while on secret missions over Laos and Cambodia. Like Johnny, when they died they were listed as "Missing in Action" -- and certainly not missing in the jungles of Cambodia. We weren't there -- remember?

The airman did a rubbing for me and I carried that sad bit of charcoal on paper in memory of my friend. I called Barry and told him I was so grateful I wasn't bringing home a rubbing of his name, because we both knew how easily it might have been... could have been... would have been...

I sat on a park bench for a long time. A bird sang in the thicket nearby. I remembered me, at age 20. I cried a little for what had once seemed promised and for what we had lost.

Later, much to my surprise, I left the park feeling relief and closure.

I flew out of Washington the next day. From the air, the Reflecting Pool meets the Lincoln Memorial. Beyond an access road and a clump of trees, the Vietnam Wall slices a deep gash into the earth. Further out, Arlington Cemetery rolls over green hills speckled with small white crosses.

Arlington still yields her soft soil and embraces dead soldiers from conflicts, old and new, current and future. Pearl Harbor to Basra. Kabul to Iwo Jima. Normandy to _______. War is so persistent. So tenacious. So universal and eternal. I might have guessed.

The True Faces of War

I saw this photograph on the BBC News website. It's an AP photo of a Pakistani woman soothing her baby as they wait to be interviewed for the refugee camp.

The face of this baby breaks my heart. He/she is already traumatized and so confused. Think of it -- you, your baby, your husband and a few family members have just fled your mountain village in northwest Pakistan. You have spent months debating, worrying, hiding from the Taliban and from the unreliable government forces and even hiding from your neighbors because war brings out the spies and fearmongers. People you have known all your life now interpret your actions to the "authorities".

The girls' school where your niece was a student was attacked by men with acid in bottles. She wasn't at school that day, and you can barely breathe when you think what might have been.

You had to pack a lifetime of memories and possessions in five minutes time. You have so few things wrapped in woven blankets. Your baby, this light of your life, keeps whimpering and clutching at your hair. You murmur, Shush, shush, your momma is here... and the fire starts at your heart and sweeps outward.

You are Mother and Child -- Somalia, Bosnia, India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Dafur. New Orleans, Kabul, Nairobi, Rwanda. Basra, Warsaw, 1940's Europe. You could be Roma, Tamil, Nicaraguan, a 1920's black woman from the backwoods of Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia.

Memorial Day 2009. Remember this woman and this baby. Cry for casualties of living wars -- dislocated Now... threatened Now... dying Now... even as we pray and parade and lay our flowered wreaths on cold stone graves.

Show this photograph to your family and friends and politicians and Congress. This is the violence we do by staying silent and allowing armies to war on our behalf. This is the cost of our "national security".

This is how we nurture the future.

Early Morning

I wake in the morning and find frigate birds and a sea lion sharing the same buoy. I heard the sea lion haul himself out of the water some time last night. We, the Rumba boat, also spent the night tethered to this buoy. It was a safe harbor for us all.

What Memories Stay

The Galapagos Islands are a world unto themselves. I get swept away when I think of what we have seen and experienced there. This time was all about green sea turtles hovering offshore, waiting for night when they lumber onto the beach and lay their eggs. It was snorkeling and swimming with small Galapagos penguins, white-tipped sharks, turtles, and eagle rays.

The marine iguanas were in full mating colors -- greens, reds, black. We saw a feeding frenzy in a small inlet where blue-footed boobies and pelicans plunged into three feet of water to feast on schools of silvery-colored fish.

A mother booby fed her ravenous chick as we stood on the path, agog. We were stung by small jellyfish in a bay overrun with boats. Sea lions swam by me. Huge frigate birds flew next to and behind our boat like escorts or guards with unknown motives.

But, what lingers in my memory is the wonder of night. From our cabin on deck, I could see the stars -- so many more, it seems, than in our northern skies. When it was hot, I opened the door where two feet straight ahead was the railing and the water beyond. Often, I woke at night and stood in that open door watching dark shadows and land masses pass by. I heard splashing when sea lions came close to the boat. I was in another world of hot, dark nights full of stars and the wild.

This is what I carry in my heart now.

Galapagos Islands

Here I sit in the February sun. It's 14 degrees F in New Hampshire. I'm watching a flurry of birds at our feeders -- bluejays, chickadees, titmice, and downy woodpeckers. The juncos scurry along the surface of the snow, eating sunflower seeds scattered from the feeders above. Flocks of goldfinch swoop and take over the trees. Mourning doves cover the ground, 14 of them at last count.

Soon, I will be in the Ecuador sun again. It's 80 degrees F at the Galapagos Islands. I'll be watching very different birds -- blue-footed boobies and magnificent frigate birds, flightless cormorants and Galapagos hawk. The famous finches and their beaks may have a message, as they did for Charles Darwin. Will I notice? Will I know what is significant and what is mere fancy?

I don't think Nature indulges in fancy. She has a purpose to every creature, every system, every feather, scale and cell. It's we human animals who ignore this truth, at our peril.

When we visited the Galapagos five years ago, I felt as if we were in another world, on a distant planet. Here, swallow-tailed gulls coexist with marine iguanas and masked boobies. The dark spot in the waves is a surfing sea lion. These animals survive together on isolated volcanic islands with more civility than we find in the marble halls of Congress.

Another fact of Nature we Democrats and Republicans, Fascists and Liberals ignore at our peril.

IT'S A NEW DAY

I want to pay tribute to those people who came before -- those millions of people who struggled, sang, preached, and  died.  This inauguration of Barak Obama belongs to those who came before -- those millions of people who were stolen, humiliated, tortured, and damned.  This day belongs to the lynched, the terrified, the grieved.  It's a call, a chorus, a testament to what is possible.  

As we are seeing today, we can never underestimate what is truly possible.  This is a gift -- and I have a host of people I hold in my heart, my mind, my memory.  They have inspired me and given our world a new day.

Today belongs to: Peg Dobbie, Arthur Newcomb, Berta, Ruth and Bud, Barry, Ginny, Trish and Laurel, outspoken teachers and professors, the children at Head Start in Westfield circa 1968.  Frances Crowe.  Caesar Chavez. Father Albert and the Community Action Program in Springfield, circa 1969.  Simon and Sue.  The Reverend Barry Stoddard.  Neal, Sheryl, and their extended family.  

Beyond War.  Peggo and Paul.  SNCC.  The Berrigans.  Pete Seeger.  Those thousands of singers who refused to be silent.  Unions and churches.  The Smothers Brothers.  Mason Williams.  Holly Near and Makeba.  Baez. Ochs.  Marion Horne. Unnamed jazz and Delta Blues bands.  Grape Boycotts and strikes.  Vietnam and "one, two, three, four - We don't want your fucking wars".

Martin Luther King, Jr. - What a fitting tribute to this man's life!   John and Robert Kennedy.  Harriet Tubman.  Quakers and abolitionists along the Underground Railway.   Immigrants who came (and still enter) into a well of suspicion and fear.    The marchers of Selma and Birmingham.   The writers who wrote after their presses had been smashed and their books burned.

For years, my vision of a just world soured into cynicism and impotence in the face of the Bush Presidencies, the Reagan years, Nixon, Cheney, Rove, Palin -- and the minions who remain nameless and faceless except for their signatures on bits of paper that seemed to destroy whatever I valued.  Education.  Environmental issues.  Wolves and whales.  Children.  Possibilities.

But it's a new day and I am alive to revel in its glory.   

I look at my lists and I know there's more. So, send me names.  It's a Whole World movement, and I'm back to being a Believer.

Christmas Eve

It's one of the most solemn nights of the year -- so full of anticipation.  We hold our collective breath as Hope is born yet again into a needy and strife torn world.  At this moment of Miracle, I discover gifts -- light, snowfall, laughter, music, and the tiny heartbeat of a titmouse at my window.

Peace to you all.

Fall Morning

The air is sharp with cold and mist rises from the mat of wet leaves.  Rays of light, like beacons of old, pierce this early morning gray and illuminate a path to the east where the sun pales day by day.  

We slip towards Solstice, Yule and the Moon of Long, Cold Nights.  

Vote! because Silence is Complicity

I'm off to vote for Barak Obama.  It's history today in my conflicted country where race, gender, age, background, disability, who your parents are still matters with a deep, mistrust of anyone "different".  I wanted to be voting for Hillary Clinton, a woman of my age and politics.  But, I will vote whole-heartedly for Barak Obama, an African-American man.

I have been moved by the stories and interviews with black Americans, who say they never expected to vote for an African-American presidential candidate in their lifetimes.  The oldest have ties to grandfathers, great-mothers who lived and died as slaves.  We met people in Kenya last year who were proud of this man who had ties to the Luo tribe.  

It's what our world should be -- meeting its promises to all peoples. 

I am reading E.L. Doctorow's THE MARCH -- about Sherman's march across Georgia and up the Carolinas.  It's a brilliant book that mixes history into stories that leave such a bitter taste of war and its aftermath.  So, I read about our Civil War and its brutalities.  I think about what happened after that War -- into Reconstruction, into the push west where the same warriors (like Sherman and Custer) turned their weapons onto Native Americans... where force, fear, humiliation, poverty, Manifest Destiny, the  KKK, Jim Crow, lynchings, political cowards, and that endless racism gave one kind of people the perverted power to lord over others.

So, as I said, I am going to vote for Barak Obama and then, I will be present and active in this endless struggle for peace and dignity and human rights -- in a sustainable and healthy world.  

And, if the old white men who have ravaged our people and resources think they can steal this election too, I'll be there on the streets, as we should have been in the year 2000, but weren't.  

Visual Haiku

In writing, we talk about Voice, the unique way our writing sounds on the page. When I use pictures, I wonder what is the equivalent of Voice.  Vision?  Light and shadow?

Here, it's late afternoon.  I stand at the edge of Small Greenough Pond on the northern border where Maine meets New Hampshire. Black Mountain looms to the west and swallows the sun earlier than expected.  The air is fresh and still. Pickerel weed tells me it's summer, and the faint ripples hint at the rich life below the surface, beyond what I can see.

Voice and vision.  Image and word.  I need both.

AUNT SASSY SINGS

From Cranberry Lake to Oswegatchie,
Indian Stream and  Stillwater,
We found Big Moose and the Enchanted Wood,
Not that we was looking, mind.

Up to Whetstone. Carthage. Phillie.
Driving fast and sleeping light.
I held that knife to my bosom.
Held it firm. Held it tight.

"Damn that man," my sister muttered.
"Damn all Hell," Aunt Sassy cried.
Race past Plessis and Keywaydin.
Getting close. I'll give  you that.

Drive in slow-like. Cut the lights.
Creep like possums, bite like lice.
Sassy slammed the old screen door.
Listen to that dead man snore.

Grab them papers, deed, the box.
Rifle money, break the lock.
Race that Packard, black as sin.
Fly through Oxbow and Bonaparte.

Sassy sings us like the lark.


Author's Notes: This poem came from a workshop with Liz Ahl. She gave us parts of road maps, four odd words and one object. My object was a small, delicate pocket knife. We had to use two of the words we were given. I used "screen door" and "black". The prompt was: write a road trip poem using your object and two words. I love what happens when I have wide boundaries and seemingly unrelated ideas to put together into a nourishing stew. I really don't know where this one came from -- but I like it!

Summer Mind

Nothing says summer like a walk on the beach. Bay View in Saco, Maine.

On the Northwest frontier of New Hampshire

Last night I joined in a writing activity with Pakistani educators who are attending an institute at our local university. It is teachers-teaching-teachers in the finest tradition -- global in nature, respectful, and open.

We wrote about our cultures' traditions and ceremonies, and then shared our writing pieces with those at our table. We listened to one another's reflections on weddings, funerals, Thanksgiving, the Solstice. We spoke of big changes happening in our countries. We said later, you see how many things we have in common.

One man wrote of his homeland in what the British named the "North-West Frontier". It's where Pakistan and Afghanistan share a border, a place of long-lasting conflict and struggle. It's also a place of beauty and contrasts. It will soon be renamed Pukhtunkwa to cut away another mark of colonial rule.

Today, Barry and I rode to northwest New Hampshire to explore and kayak. We found a small lake with a noisy beaver, a silent loon, and a quiet family of Canada geese. We paddled there much of the afternoon, just the two of us with a chorus of birdsong from the trees that crowded to the shore.

It was a place of beauty and peace. How utterly different from the northwest province of Pakistan where my government, its allies, and local rivalry wage war even today.

In our history, this corner of New Hampshire would have seen war between French, Indian, English and colonists. The Connecticut River was a marker, a way to move people and goods. The indigenous peoples were driven out and the rich bottom land became the immigrants' farms and created wealth and power for a few.

It is an ancient struggle and a question to be answered by each generation. How do we live with one another without killing and coveting what they have? What is peace? And why is it so difficult to live.

I wonder if one day, a man and wife in northwest Pakistan will be able to walk freely in those mountains. Stop for a picnic. Admire the views and the quiet day. And return home with the full hearts and peacefulness that comes from such simple, human pleasures.

May this come to pass -- and may we all in the world do our part to make this happen for all peoples.

Fire and Ice

"What is dying? A ship sails and I stand watching till she fades on the horizon, and someone at my side says, 'She is gone'. Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large as when I saw her. The diminished size and loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says she is gone, there are others who are watching her coming. Other voices take up a glad shout: 'There, she comes!' ... and that is dying."

Godspeed, Ruth. "Look," they cry, "she's here!"

("What is dying" is part of a poem written by Bishop Brent, an Episcopal bishop in the Philippines. He lived 1862-1929.)