Luna Zeffer

Welcome, 2012!

2011-12-30T21:11:00.000-08:00

That mysterious year is upon us. I believe that we will know in 2012 the blending of Spirit into a New Calendar, that is, as is true of all calendars, a day-by-day progression toward the growth of human understanding.

The bumps along the Way are undeniable. The world news defines them for us every day from every slant in every medium in shades of gray and black and in the colors of blood. For some, the New Year portends the end of the world, with the "end" of the Mayan calendar.--a register of time that repeats itself in cycles. According to Wikipedia, "the Maya name for a day was k'in. Twenty of these k'ins are known as awinal or uinal. Eighteen winals make one tun. Twenty tuns are known as ak'atun. Twenty k'atuns make a b'ak'tun." Will such a cyclical view of time wind down?

The Wikipedia account continues: "Sandra Noble, executive director of the Mesoamerican research organization FAMSI, notes that 'for the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle.' She considers the portrayal of December 2012 as a doomsday or cosmic-shift event to be 'a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.'"

The conclusion? "Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a New Age belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012, is simply the day that the calendar will go to the next b'ak'tun."

The k'ins of 2011 circled me back to my age of 16, second cycle. Through nearly two years of working the Food Addicts in Recovery, weight is no longer an issue, as it has been for most of my life. I'm living in a normal-sized body, eating fabulous meals of vegetables, protein, grain, and fruit. I shop (second hand) with joy, watching for colors and shapes and labels (!) that I've never worn before--so different from the black and navy days of 16, the first time around. I'm walking regularly, meditating, doing Taoist exercises, writing more, and working through the emotional aspects of life hidden while I lived in a "stout" (my grandmother's word for zoftig and above) and nearly inoperable body.

I've begun to keep my camera close, exploring Cloverdale's "wilderness," a 500-and-some-acre area behind the town's largest and most elegant senior housing development. A paved road goes continually UP to our massive water towers. Along the lower trail, Porterfield Creek, which once provided the town's water, winds through a canyon of manzanita and madrone, oak, pine, scrub, wild flowers, and early-morning spider webs, dewy and in multitudes in the low grasses.

You can check out my photos at http://byrdsbeautifulworld.blogspot.com. That website is no longer active but the archives remain. Scroll down the left column to the list of names (mine is near the top) followed by a number in parentheses. Click on that, and all my photo posts will come up.

Poetry readings this year have included three celebrating the state parks threatened for closure--seventy of them, mostly in Northern California. We're reading from What Redwoods Know, a chapbook edited by Katherine Hastings. More readings are lined up for 2012. You can protest the closures at savestateparks.org by sending a message to California's elected officials. The state budget will hardly notice the changes, with no consideration for lost tourist dollars in the park areas.

I also read twice with Night Writers, a Cloverdale writers' group, and frequently at the open mic at the monthly Center Literary Cafe in Healdsburg, now home ground for a community of writers. And last week I read at Valle Verde Senior Residential Community to a group of elders, including my 97-year-old mother.

I'm planning a "news fast" during January--the worst and the best of what's going on in the world seems to filter through even when you don't follow the headlines! The tumult and turmoil requires standing steady. I sometimes remember my favorite quote of Thomas Jefferson's and wonder if that cycle, too, has not begun again:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."--Letter to Abigail Adams (12 May 1780)

May the mysteries of 2012 entice you and inspire you as we enter into the New Calendar.

Photograph, "Foggy December at Kings Valley," by Luna Zeffer

Last Lap of a Long Race

2011-11-14T16:02:00.000-08:00

for Ray

What is a likeness? When a person dies, they leave behind, for those who knew them, emptiness, a space: the space has contours and is different for each person mourned. This space with its contours is the person's likeness and is what the artist searches for when making a living portrait. A likeness is something left invisibly behind.--from The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger

He lived on the edge of death, hand in hand with his own mortality. At first, Death trotted along behind like a faithful dog, loyal as the memory of barefoot days by the lake of his childhood. Then it took his breath away as it ran in front, pulling him into its river, forcing him to swim upstream.

In the rare still pools of his existence, his friendship ran deep. His wisdom, his compassion were gifts, radiant in connection.

When the darkness came again, he rocked himself to sleep, comfortable in the arms of the old shadow that had trailed him for so long. Death was as familiar as a well-worn garden glove or the cracking leather of his hiking boot as he ran on ahead and was gone.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Trees

2011-11-08T03:35:00.000-08:00

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.” Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

The nights turn cold and the days can't make up their minds. Crow flocks, raucous in the foothills, plan to stay over, while the sky practices for the rainy season by clouding up part of every day. On the road to Healdsburg, fog follows the Russian river all the way and blankets the wine country town with its posh plaza, tasting rooms, galleries of art. Except for the hours of cloud practice, Cloverdale stays clear. Our low mountains seem higher, magnificent in their gold jackets of winter grass and the rising river fog over their shoulders.

Along the back roads, light flushes the creek banks. In the dried grasses, whatever moves rustles, size indistinguishable--lizard? cautious step of a deer about to startle at my presence? a walnut falling, or a dried branch?

The trees turn late, moving quickly from yellow to maroon and then to brown, with none of the slow brilliance of last year but a new beauty. Along the creek trail in our "wilderness," the stream begins to trill with the early rains, and the hills look like China in their draperies of fog and river mist. In the vineyards, the turning has begun, and each wine grape adds its own color to the striped fields of leaves.

The tampering with time that goes on every year at this time has invited darkness into the late afternoon and light a little earlier in the morning."Spring forward, fall back." Time, already so arbitrary an invention, now gets pushed around into a change of schedule as though it were real. "Real time," we say, forgetting that we made it up back in the days of the serf, who kept "time" by the sun. The lords of the manor thought a clock tower beyond the fields would do a better job

I had a couple pieces included in What Redwoods Know, a book assembled by Katherine Hastings (and printed by her, and bound). We've begun a series of readings in Sebastopol, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz for the first round. Each work within the book reflects inspiration from a California state park, those that are destined for permanent closure next year. Most are in Northern California (a very few in the South), and many are oceanside. For one-tenth of one percent of California's budget, 70 parks will be closed, among them one of my favorites--MacKerricher on the coast north of Fort Bragg. It holds fragments of the California landscape--a three-mile sandy ocean beach with dunes, a small lake (or a large pond) with a trail through the woods with birds aplenty and a boardwalk around one end, a meadow, bluffs, and the rocky resting places of the harbor seals, white in some seasons. Otters swim on their backs in the shallows and gulls rest on the posts of the trailside decks.

Talk now is of real estate development on these lands, many given to the state by those who lived on them. Jack London's home will no longer be protected. Several parks have beat the deadline for closure, and more have closed campgrounds and visitor centers. This is what the redwoods know. Protest, if you will, to Governor Brown, your congressional representatives and senators, and support the Coastal Commission, which is endangered as well.

Redwood lumber yards make up a good hunk of Cloverdale's job possibilities.

Meanwhile, the maroon madrones and the manzanita (little apple) go about the business of growing up the hillsides and, on the golden hill, the live oaks still echo in their shadows. Trees. Burning in South America. Dying of this disease or that across the country.

Three redwoods stand at the edge of the buildings of senior housing where I live, patterning themselves against the sunset in silhouette. They are relatively young, but still they know. They've heard rumors about the lumber yards and the empty stretches of blank where the trees have been cut and hauled out, stark deforested areas hidden behind a few rows left standing. Circles of time trace the cuts, time by years and centuries, not the arbitrary shifts of light we humans bear with the season's change. After a time, our body clocks settle into the differing hours.

I've stood in the circle of redwoods, grown up around a fallen grandfather, and listened to them breathe in whispers, reaching for the sky. They almost reach it. Their electric presence trembles through me in the silent preserves that will no longer be available to those who love their beauty.

Photographs by Luna Zeffer

October Light

2011-10-23T13:02:00.000-07:00

"If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hav a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabet that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression."--Andre Kertesz

The light in the vineyards this time of year is sweeter than the grapes. Early rains interrupt the harvest and, on clear days, side roads are filled with the roar of transport of the mechanical pickers and lined with the cars of the human ones, who work night and day during the bringing in of the grapes. Many take as much work as they can get so that they can spend a month, or two, or three with their wives and children in Mexico before the spring work begins.

The vineyards are turning---a field of yellow where one wine grape grows, another of maroon, red, or gold. Their patchwork of color covers the hills. Soon, the fruit that remains on the vine will begin to ferment and the air will smell like wine.

In this season of beauty and change, I change, my body thinning and reshaping itself, my heart watching my lurches or unrippled flow and the urgency of seeing, now, the moment I am in, the truth of my life.

The Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous has become my test pattern, the constant in the background of the chatter of the mind. Some days, i hear one line. Another day, the emphasis shifts. One evening, I hear a deeper meaning. I wake up some mornings with the chant of it halfway begun before my eyes open.

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

This year, it might well be the prayer of the vintner as Octobers scurries through the fields with the grapes still hanging on.

Kertesz quotation from Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography, by Barbaralee Diamonstein

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Broken Bough, Broken Vow

2011-09-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

Last spring on a walk in Cloverdale I came across a broken bough, blossoms still fresh, across the road. I made several photographs, a little puzzled. Why record an act of violence, with little beauty to explain itself--not the heaping of clouds before a storm nor the ravages of flood that brush reflection across a field, but an act of blatant destruction--a smashed and broken bough?

Today, as I consider a broken vow, the photograph comes to mind. The considerations that evoked the vow still blossom. When I say "I vow...," to whom am I speaking? And when I break that vow, who is listening? How far can a bough, or a vow, bend before the breaking? If I add time as an element of change, when did the breakage begin?

I'm glad I've kept the photograph. Today, it shows me where I am. The vow was a promise to myself, to a way of health and healing. I didn't hear it break. No other was involved. For days my mind did not acknowledge the first crack nor the split nor the damage done. Today, I make the vow again, fresh as a spring blossom. I begin again to follow the path on which it led me.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Ohio Men

2011-08-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

Ohio men never wanted to be boys. They strutted right out of childhood, drove tractors when they were eight and cars when they were twelve, got their own at sixteen, best if it were a ‘55 Chevy, turquoise and white, with the fins of a shark. Jerry Green, who got his black Mercury on his seventeenth birthday, drove it into the side of a bridge that evening and went without wheels until he got a job at the creamery.

They lent their basketball jackets, number on the back, to girls in study hall who pretended to be cold. They left birthday parties after the hot dogs and before the games, went to Emil’s for strawberry pie. They aimed everything at graduation, when their lives would begin.

They went to work baling hay or digging trenches for new septic tanks, realizing that graduation wasn’t the beginning but the end of their dreams.

They walked ruts along the edges of their territory, the small worlds they’d made. The ruts, too deep to cross, became the boundaries of their vision. They worked hard, married, had kids—everything a good man in Ohio was expected to do--and wondered if it was any use at all to tell their sons what they’d discovered about life. Probably not.

--from The Sound of a Thousand Leaves, Redwood Writers Vintage Voices anthology, 2011 (forthcoming)

Photograph by Luna Zeffer (panel of mural, Andy's produce market, Sebastopol, California)

Picking Up the Camera

2011-05-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

Hewn log...

"Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.... [The] very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images."--Susan Sontag,

On Photography

When Office Depot put the Canon Power Shot digital on sale...well, it was an impulse buy. The first photographs I took at a stop along a side road caught lines of grapevines that led the eye to the range of foothills to the east of Cloverdale. A yearning for distance, for what was "over there," directed my eye. Our landscape is squared off and striped by the vineyards that dominate what grows here in a valley that once was rich with apples, pears, apricots, walnuts and mustard, artichokes, and table vegetables. Now the rolling rows define the hills in grids. At first, they got in the way, served only as pointers to what lay beyond them.

The first photograph...

Then I turned to trees, silhouetted against empty sky and the sea at Mendocino Headlands.

The world out there, the more vast, the better. I began to post at Beautiful World, which requires only that an image must reveal something beautiful--and no people, for reasons of privacy. I began to learn from other posters. They came in close, chose detail over far space, worked with color, texture, abstraction. When niece Jeny visited, she introduced me to the macro setting I didn't know I had (who reads manuals?) My images began to change. I moved in close. Soon the world was made of photographs. Everywhere I looked I saw a fragment that could be caught in a rectangle.

Road Chatter: Back road, Sonoma County

Overcast day, Bolinas Bay

Road by the Russian River, after floods

I set myself assignments. Don Worth, years ago at San Francisco State, set a challenge: Photograph in black-and-white but using color film (you remember film). I remember Minor White, with whom I traveled for some time for a couple summers at Capitol Reef National Park. (I paraphrase what he said about abstraction.) Most photographers want something in the photograph that clings to reality, he said, one night around the campfire. When you can let go of that, you are beginning to work with the truly abstract.

Reflections in a tide-washed beach, Bolinas Bay

Music: Vineyard in flood--notice the touch of "reality" still showing!

From the early images that beckoned me out--mountain, sea, the vineyards marking the land--I came close, looking at the inner through contrast of dead stalks with new growth at their feet, a dried leaf on a living century plant, lost in details of form, color, texture, and something about meaning.

Now I've taken on the task of letting go of boundaries, of the dimensions of space--letting go, as Minor said, of the urgency of leaving a little reality in the picture! What's next? I wonder. But I'm not leaning forward to find out. My eye is right here, right now, looking at where I'm standing.

Fallen wall of early Cloverdale winery

Stream near Cloverdale, California

Last year's apple and the crop to come

Rest stop

Morning after an all-night rain

Carnival

Avila Beach, California

Comfort zone

Spring in wine country

Visiting armada of antique cars, Cloverdale

This is the way I see the world these days, and the camera serves as a device for grounding.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

High Walk Out of Town and Emily DickInson

2011-04-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

A single mossy tree...

The paved road up into the eastern hills in Cloverdale's little "wilderness" parallels Porterfield Creek as you climb to the town's water towers. The road has no downhill dips. It's an uphill climb all the way, through meadows, then scrub and manzanita, then madrone, tall pines, and the great live oaks hovering over their shadows. The first big mossy tree flings its arms in every direction, like a gate guardian to the wooded section of the trail high above the creek. If the hiker doesn't recoil, its limbs seem to wave in welcome.

Barrier branches...

Winter-brittle branches not yet greened by spring reach out on the horizontal. Everywhere, the green is rising. Even high above the stream, running full after spring rains, the roar of water at full fall, too, is rising. Little falls erupt from the grasses on the hillside. Any trace that has ever been a water run is full now, following the hill down to join the main stream.

Fallen elder, returning...

All along the path, fresh leaflets emerge from the base of winter-dry stalks of anise, spring defying the gray-dead stands of last year. Then, against a hill, I come upon the outline of a fallen tree in decay, this cycle of Nature a transformation with no promise of revival, survival in the old form. Trunk, limbs, have begun the slow process of returning to soil.

Billy Collins, reading and discussing Emily Dickinson's work on NPR, tells his students, "If you're majoring in English, you're majoring in death. That's what you're getting for your tuition." Death is surely Emily's major subject. (In my copy of her complete poems, "Death" is indeed the longest list in the subject index, with a final note, "See also Immortality and Resurrection," and preceded by a longish entry for "Dead.")

When I first visited Emily's Amherst home, I met a college dean who had played the Julie Harris role in The Belle of Amherst, a one-woman play in which only Emily is portrayed. I'd seen Harris's performance both on the stage and on television, so I knew the way in which the drama brought all the major figures in Emily's world to life through her dramatic gestures toward them. Quite by accident, I met the dean again the next morning at Emily's grave. For nearly an hour, she pointed out the places Emily had written about and recited the poems she had written, as though Emily had leaped up from the fenced off family plot to say them one more time.

After the tour, I'd walked to the church Emily's father had helped to build. She'd gone down the street with him one moonlit night to see the structure, though she had never gone inside. Inside, I met a minister who'd shared with me the moment in the cupola outside Emily's upstairs room--her vantage point to look over the town--the sound of one fly buzzing to its autumn death. At the church, he was very nearly in tears, with the spectrum of stained glass dappling his shoulders. "My wife died this past year," he said. "Only two things could comfort me: the bible, and the poems of Emily Dickinson."

Billy Collins said, "I like the little poems. The poet, after all, is an apparitional figure--opening the door, saying something, and closing it again."

When Terry Gross asked Collins to comment on Emily's biography and its effect on her work, Collins said, "I prefer the poem to the life." Then he confessed he had written a poem, "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes," in response to the mysteries of her sexuality. The poet chooses to disrobe Emily from the clothes she wore in her poem "Because I would not stop for Death," where Death takes her in her carriage. First he removes her tippet of tulle, then her bonnet, the white dress. At last, he frees her of her corset. In one line, he describes "...the sudden dashes when we spoke." His poem, he suggested slyly, should resolve the issue of whether Emily had ever made love.

High country...

Death walks along the trail with me as I climb out of the valley, in the dry stalks of last year's vegetation, in the fallen tree, in the underbrush where new grass is pushing through. In the high dry bareness near the water towers, I remember the desert I love, the spare empty ground of silence, sage after rain, the alkaline fragrance of the soil in the relentless heat of summer, where I could hear the gnat at my ear, the beat of my own heart, the simple sounds of life in the stillness that made room for them.

Cloverdale nestled in the valley...

Down below me, tucked between the hills to east and west, lies Cloverdale, the village where I live. The little mountain town nestles in the Alexander Valley, among the prime wineries at the foot of the Mayacamas mountains to the east, and the eastern hills where I stand. In the far mountains, eighteen steam power plants could light most of the state of California, as they now light the Golden Gate Bridge and much of the northern part of the state. There, the earth's magma is close to the surface (about two miles down). Geysers spring up, and steam. At the plants, the steam turns generators and then is "recycled" back to the earth's heat to rise again as steam. A simplistic explanation for a complicated process.

The old town slogan, "Where the redwoods meet the vineyards," has changed since Cloverdale was named the (second) "best small town in America" in 2010. Now we are "Genuinely Cloverdale.

Coming down again, past the dry hillside, the fallen tree, the dry stalks of last year's vegetation with green newness pushing through, Emily comes to mind again. Her home, her words, her punctuation without explanation.

Visiting Emily Long AfterHer Death

Morningwithout you is a dwindled dawn.—E.D.

She faces down her fatheracross the living room,
meeting the eyes of hisphotograph, the familiar one
where he glowers as thephotographer aims.
Smile, Mr. Dickinson.

I am smiling, Emily’s father replies,
or so the tour guide says.In her Mt. Holyoke dress
of white eyelet, Emilystifles a grin, if ever she grins.
His grimness is no pose.All that punctuation

up in her room in thedrawer, all those poems
not yet shouting out thedoor, dashed and divided,
broken thoughts, healing.Emily gets her things
for the long saunter inthe stormy night

to Death, the coldshoulder of New England snow.
In the tower room, Emily’sperspective on the world,
a slow fly dies, an echoof the buzz in the line of a poem.
The church can be seen,the one her father built.

He takes her out for awalk under the moon that falls
over the quarried stone,the steeple brushing the clouds,
polite windows of gray andblack glass, not ostentatious
but rich withparishioner’s funds. Her father’s church.

She struggles with love ata distance: a few parlor calls,
words flung out on theirown. Her sister-in-law Sue.
High-coach Austin, buriedaway from the family plot
in the new cemetery. Herbrother. His choice and demand.

In her room hang whitecurtains, freshly washed,
as though she will drawthem aside for a view
of the town, Amherst, theedge of her vision.
Glasses folded on herdesk, she sleeps.

Thank you, Emily, for making me want to be a poet. I'm working on it...

Photographs by Luna Zeffer
Apologies for spacing problems! Couldn't fix! gl

Letter to Japan

2011-03-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

You, who receive,show us the way to acceptance,

a crumbled home. You, who stay thecourse

at the brokencontainers of fear,

guide us in ourfootsteps

through the debrisof our greed.

You, who contain thedownfall

of our gain, comfortus

as we count thescattered cars

among land-boundships,

family albums, theuselessness

of money, fame,collecting.

You give to yourneighbor

some of the wateryou have left

as you watch thisminister

or that tell younothing is wrong.

You rejoice as afamily

when an old man

who floats to sea onthe roof

of his house, hiswife swept away,

is found. I am to console you?

Here, we have apotter who makes Japan

in clay and glaze.On a plate,

the Emperor’skimono, that stylized shape

we all recognize.Today,

I stopped by hiscase in a gallery.

Four monks, parasolsin hand,

walk through therain. On another bowl,

the simplicity ofshoes, easy

to slip off beforethe formal bow

to all that is.

I bow to you, to thehome

you carry in yourheart.

Bless the fifty whohave stayed

in the radiance ofdestruction,

and the thousands ofsouls

who have gone on.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

The Order of Things

2011-03-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

Writing no longer wishes to be first in my life nor asks to be, nor begs, but demands its place at the top of the to-do list every day. Every day, wordsmust be written, revised, sent out. Writing prefers the word “submitted.”

Where once stood fields of mustard, vegetables, almonds, olives, and orchards of apples, pears--now all vineyards, their beautiful lines upon the land--all gone to wine...

Many a winter's trim and wait gnarls the vine

Trunks and cordons in a flooded field

Patent medicine, old style

Writing takes me outphotographing for fifteen minutes and comes home five hours later, and mycamera and I have wandered through flooded vineyards, past anorange-and-rusty-red retired train, along a creek bed savaged by the recentrains, to the supermarket vegetable counter at Ray’s.

Roadside still life

Unexpected harbinger

Creekside with anise

What I see becomes indelible, camera or not, and the reflections of the flooded fields grow solid and transform into words. All I see becomes a prompt for writing.

"56": Boxcar art

Writing demands my time--first,before breakfast—and lectures me:“You will give me part of everyday. We have things to say.”

…simple things that seemedonce to be unimportant, like a weed or a metal road rail with a few pieces ofpatterned wood beside it. The visions of earth and memory have becomesignificant.

Tree portrait

Under a stand of pines

What is there to say butthe beauty of landscape, how it presumes to become the subject of whatever Iwrite or buries itself as a subplot or metaphorical rush that defines the characterof a poem or essay?

Calligraphy of road repair

More gifts from the Mother--all earth's gifts nurture

All things come from theearth, are made of earth. Light falls on a fallow field, frost-covered, or onthe jungle, perhaps, and its tangle, where in the third tier of foliage monkeyschat. The gibbon whoop-whoop-whoops in descending scale: alive. alive, alive.

Photographs by Luna Zeffer

Where Did the Twenty Trillion Dollars Go?

2011-02-27T23:59:00.000-08:00

“…a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of2008...at a cost over$20 trillion…”—ad copy for the movie Inside Job

My guess is"pockets." Many lovely cashmere coat pockets, many Ferrari sidepockets, many pockets of many already millionaires and a few billionaires, lotsof Congressional pockets. Nothing for pockets of despair, job-loss emptypockets, pockets of disease, depression, hunger, homelessness.

The pockets of the newlyrich have no eyes; they don't see the pockets of anguish or the gap now so widebetween rich and poor that it can never be leaped, even by the strongestjumpers.

The pockets of the oldwealthy have a dim vision and see the need for giving. So they support theopera, the symphony, the art gallery, perhaps the March of Dimes.

The pockets of the poor are empty. Their eyes arewide open. They know by heart that the catalog of necessities for life—food,clothing, and shelter, as every fourth-grade geography book defines them—is amatter of truth, for without them one can only hope for one thing: survival,survival, survival…and hope grows thin, the way old clothes do, and so does thesoup.

And so do the children

With an apology forgeneralizations, which do not tell the whole story

Photograph, “ImpendingStorm,” by Luna Zeffer

Rockin' with the '50s: Citrus Fair 2011

2011-02-26T02:42:00.000-08:00

Every October, when the leaves turn on Mt. Pleasant, the Fairfield County Fair, last in Ohio’s long season of fairs, spreads around the racetrack at the foot of the mountain. If you’ve seen My Friend Flicka, you know that racetrack, where Flicka proves her young owner right: she’s a winner. And you know that mountain, which, thanks to the cinematographer’s skills, never quite reveals itself as the only mountain for miles. In the West, it might be called a butte, and a small one at that.

County schools close for three days. 4H-ers load the animals they've raised--calves, hogs, sheep, fancy chickens with iridescent feathers and show-worthy struts--into farm trucks and take up residence in the fairground barns, sleeping on the hay outside the pens. They're banking on a blue ribbon and a livestock sale for college funds. Town kids put up their projects in the display barn--maybe Girl's Room, a sewing project, with curtains and ruffled bedspread, paint swatches, and plans, or Woodworking, a footstool for mother or a tool box for dad, or the other way around.

Ride concessions rise up, great wheels and shafts of light,like a field of metal dinosaurs. Carnies set out the ring toss and shooting gallery,the cotton candy stand, plug in the Belgian waffle makers and the etchingneedles for the silver charms and ID bracelets they’ll engrave with initials ornames.

In the 1950s, we go all three days, hang out in the barns, dizzy ourselves onthe Ferris wheel, check out the art displays and our mothers’ entries in thefood barn—my mother’s catsup, black with spices; pickles, dill, sweet,end-of-the-garden. Punkin pies.

The marching bands of all twelve county schoolsmeet for practice on the grassy infield of the race track, working out theformations for the big show on the fair’s last day. Our purple-and-whiteuniforms weave among the moving mass band in patterns with the school colors of ouropponents in basketball. We know our Sousa fight songs. Now we have to coordinateour steps.

Every February, when the trees in Cloverdale are heavy with oranges and lemons, it’s the county fair all over again. Quilts hang from the rafters of the art building. The quilter who wins this year's first prize (and a Special Award), took three years to construct the bed of flowers, each within its own square, then quilted into unity with the stitching patterns that join it.

A girl clown wanders the grounds with an animated “cobra” in a wheelbarrow, warning passers-by not to come too close. The Senior Center offers coffee, popcorn, homemade snicker doodles and double-chocolate brownies.

A rack of bibs targets the stylin' baby.

Spring flowers in the garden patches in the great hall sport tossed-down, old-style bikes, primroses blooming between the spokes.

I teeter somewhere between high school and old age as I check out the citrus exhibits. This year's theme, "Rockin' with the 50s," reflects much more rocking than I remember in Fairfield County, Ohio. Elvis's blue suede shoes rest at the foot of a piano made of oranges. Mel's citrus-built drive-in wins first prize. The Kiwanis musical setting cames in second.

On the carnival grounds, camel rides with rabbit, giraffe with full-maned prancing horse.

The swinging, swirling, fast-track rides spin and twirl and tilt and stop to load up again all afternoon, the "big" rides, for the brave with stomachs of steel.

At night, the two fairs could be one, if I ignore the time lapse. Merry-go-round music, hot dogs, the constant ringing win when a ball falls into a cup or a duck falls over at the shooting gallery. A sign at the cake contest that reads “Please don’t eat the entries,” just like at home. Barkers and shills. Lights. A hall of mirrors. Illusion for sale

In our small school in dairy country, we square dance on the gym floor or pile in the back of a farm wagon for a hayride. My rock experience in the mid 50s confined itself to skipping stones on farm ponds. Not until 1955, at Radio City Music Hall on our senior class trip, where we saw Bill Haley and the Comets in Rock Around the Clock, first run, did our rocking begin.

I march a few Sousa steps between memory and the dazzling lights of the night as I make my way home

Ah, but they didn't have these in 1955...

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

The Abandoned Garden

2011-02-15T08:34:00.000-08:00

Don't go outside your house to see flowers.

My friend, don't bother with that excursion.

Inside your body, there are flowers.

One flower has a thousand petals.

That will do for a place to sit.

Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty

inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens.--Kabir

Kabir's poem translated by Robert Bly. Photographs by Luna Zeffer

How To Cure Road Lust

2011-02-10T22:39:00.000-08:00

You wake up with it, dream it, wrangle with the steering wheel when Carlita Willa the Third tries to get away (she loves side roads and badlands). She’s healthy for a ’91 Camry, and ready to go.

You need to stay home. You have a body to heal from years of abuse and neglect. You have unwritten memoirs of your last road trip, solo, twice around the country in a pewter-silver Dodge van. You have Commitments and Decisions To Make and, most of all, a life that needs to be examined, alphabetized, given large doses of cod liver oil and ExLax to rid you of all the …well, you know what ExLax invites.

You plug your ears when the call comes again, relentless and seductive. You beef up your to-do list, hide the powwow schedule you printed from the Internet, put Ancient Indian Ruins and Directory of National Wildlife Preserves back on the bookshelf and Peterson’s and your binoculars out of sight.

You reconsider. You pack. You get two new maps from Triple A—Indian country, your favorite chart of all time, and one of the U.S. Willa, if cars can be said to smile, grins. She steers you off the freeway at the first exit. She knows a tree-lined secondary road, and you’re on your way.

Photograph of roadside by Luna Zeffer

Headwaters

2011-02-08T13:57:00.000-08:00

Oh, how the Texas hills are purple, scattered with green in their gullies. How erosion carves triangles on the land. How the ranges connect and align even though the mountains are far apart. A single mountain, from its perspective, might believe itself alone.
My mother and I, on a slow cross-country journey to see my niece graduate from high school with high honors, came upon the Pecos River on the edge of Nowhere in Texas, high above its canyon. To the north of the high bridge, the Pecos, contained by a canyon’s cliffs, narrowed to a rushing force in its deep, narrow channel. As the canyon widened to the south, the river spread across a wide valley. Ah! the power of water in the American West never came home so strongly. Once we’d crossed that invisible (debatable) line where West meets East in Texas, water clearly and decisively defined the regions of America.
The Pecos, the last river to surprise us, flowed isolated in its splendor, grand in its setting. As we traveled through the Lone Star state, the Rio Grande, which we’d met first in Las Cruces, was always to the south of us, more a presence than a running river. Western rivers are like that, making themselves felt over their vast territory even though you stand in their presence only here and there. The Devil’s River in  Texas, running turquoise over white limestone, is one I carry in my mind. I can step into its waters at will! The Fremont, in Utah, orange much of the time from the Moenkopi layer through which it runs, runs at the nerve endings of memories I cherish. Such large watersheds these rivers nourish!
Once in Louisiana, and from then on, rivers crossed our path as everyday occurrences. Water was everywhere: farm ponds, chains of lakes, creeks, bayous, and the many broad, slow rivers we knew by name or had never heard of. What an unexpected taking to the heart Louisiana was, where water lends space to land, and we drove on thin webs of earth borrowed from the waterways. Along the Mississippi in New Orleans, we sat on a bench to watch the cargo ships passing the walkway that serves as the city’s front porch.
And so the journey went. We crossed the Ohio, our “home river,” on the drive to visit Pickerington, where I grew up. My hometown had prospered and grown, and the familiar passed by like single cels of a long film we’d never seen before. We passed the yellow brick 12-grade school, now the elementary and one of eleven schools in town, and the tiny church where I was married. At our house on the hill, we were invited in by the owner when she saw us parked in front to give it a close look.
Before we traveled on, we drove three miles to the farm outside the little village, where we’d lived our first several years in Pickerington. No one was home, so we drove back the lane where the school bus had picked me up for elementary school. Oh, how I had loved the creek beyond the barn lot. I thought it a minor Colorado River, far away from the house, where we played and waded beyond any adult eye. As we sat at the end of the long driveway, near the barn and the corn crip and the hay mow where I read all the books of early childhood, I saw, to my amazement, our brook, a mere trickle—the first waterway I ever loved, and a tributary to all the rivers that flowed through my life. It ran close by, near enough for Mother to see us from the kitchen window.
Photographs of Russian River, in flood, near Cloverdale, and the South Branch of the Eel River in Northern California by Luna Zeffer

Peach Fuzz Summer

2011-02-06T17:34:00.000-08:00

Harold Goldie Hurff, Jr., was the first boy I ever kissed that I hadn’t known since third grade. He was a college man—Rutgers—working for the summer for Sam De Cou on Sam’s truck farm outside Haddonfield, New Jersey. The orchards and fields and the sorting and packing conveyer system on the long tables at the back of the huge open market required a crew of fifty Puerto Ricans to do the labor. They came every year with their jefe Luis. Each year, Luis brought a Maria along. One year, it was Maria his wife. The next it was Maria his mistress. The summer I was one of the students who sold fruits and vegetables up front at Sam De Cou’s, the Maria was his wife.

Several other Marias and the few other women of the crew picked the small things. Strawberries, the tasteless beauties big as a plum that Rutgers was developing (and everyone wanted to buy) and the sweet tiny ones, less expensive and fragrant before the bite, that I guided favorite customers toward. Kentucky Wonder beans for snapping. Onions. They carried their harvest in flat baskets that rested on bandannas of paisley and plaid, a sway with each step for balance, one hand at the basket’s rim, the other on the hip over the long skirts, striped with the colors of the spectrum, they wore even in the fields.

Peaches were the main crop on Sam De Cou’s farm. Never, even in Georgia, did peaches grow sweeter. When the peaches came in, the shoppers multiplied. The pickers took to the trees with ladders and bushel baskets and brought the fruit in by truck to the sorting belts, where a row of Puerto Ricans lined each side to pluck out the bad ones (not many) and the most elegant (those for the market up front). Every night after the conveyor belt had hummed all day and the loaders had stacked it high, a truck as big as a moving van set out for Philadelphia with, they said, a load of fruit, graded by size, worth $2000. Not to be sniffed at, that, in the mid 1950s.

The market sales were small stuff by comparison. They were the lure for the customers who wanted a drive in the country for the best peaches in the world. As each one stepped under the roof, one of us—Ray, our boss, who had passed on the order to us from Sam, my old friend Katie, who had moved away from Ohio and whose family hosted me for the summer, Harold Goldie Hurff, or me---broke a peach in half. Juice rolled down our arms. In the summer heat and frenzy of passing out the treats, the fuzz of the peach soon followed the trail, and the itching began. All the long days of summer. Each day until the sun went down. Peach half by peach half, drip by drip, the peach fuzz clung. It moved to the eyes, the cheeks. In shorts, the legs began to gather the dusty fuzz.

Every evening at dusk, as we rang out the registers and covered the fruit, from along the fence beside the barn where the Puerto Ricans slept rose love songs. Louder and sweeter they came, as the Spanish words floated across the fields to Katie and me. We recognized some of the dark faces—Handsome One, we called the one who came at every break to buy a Pepsi and shook his head when we (always) gave him the wrong change. He knew his coinage. The two Joses. Jesus. Freshly showered, free of the dust and fuzz of the sorting belts, the chorus sang to us or to the setting sun, the crickets, the darting flashes of lightning bugs. To summer. To work. To the end of a day of work.

Sam De Cou had two sons. Sam, Jr., was Ray’s boss. His eyes were bluer than Paul Newman’s, and his blond pompadour was brushed back just so. He pulled up in his green Saab several times a day to check on us, though it was never clear what he was checking. We were splitting the peaches and offering them to customers. I was thumping the watermelons. “This is a good one,” I’d point,. My customers came back. They asked for me. “She can really pick a good melon,” they’d say. Melons, I found, must be treated like drums. Properly pounded, the thumps took on harmony. The boss was in the bathroom with a magazine, “pulling a Ray,” stretching a break into 20 minutes of reading pleasure after a quick splash at the sink over the itching arms before sitting down. Katie was making (the wrong) change for the Handsome One, who was grinning and shaking his head. She added an extra dime. He giggled at the profit he’d made. Sam , Jr., squealed out of the parking lot.

Four times a day—you could set your watch—little Richard De Cou flew in on his green Schwinn, stopping with a sideways lurch two feet from the cash register. He’d come to check the mint symbols on the pennies. He clattered through the drawer at top speed, pulled out the “D’s and “S’s” and checked the dates. He knew which ones were worth 2 cents, or 5, and he relieved the register of those. Without a word, he flung himself back on his bike and wheeled away. The next one of us who rang up a sale approached the cash drawer carefully. More often than not, Richard would have emptied a jar of bees into the tray, and they were none too pleased when we set them free with a register ring.

Sam De Cou himself rarely came to the market, and if he did, he headed to the back to watch the packing operation. He paid us 25 cents an hour, and he expected us to earn it with no supervision from him. Sam, Jr., was to take care of that. Once, early in the summer, he had come to talk to the three of us, to dangle before us the promise of a bonus at the end of the summer “for the best student worker among you.” All summer we wondered what Sam’s bonus would be. One hundred dollars? Two? We didn’t compete, not really, but we worked hard, and the bonus was always at the back of our thoughts.

The day the market closed down for the year, Sam De Cou came to talk to us again, and he gave the prize. The $25 prize. And he gave it twice, once to Harold Hurff and once to me. We took Katie out for ice cream.

And one night toward the end of summer, on the rise where the town kids went to neck, a flashlight shone through the front window of Harold Goldie Hurff’s green Ford, moving in circles. Police. A warning. We moved on. I went back to Ohio with a big bag of peaches. Harold went back to Rutgers.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

How To Keep Chaos from Taking Over

2011-02-01T14:24:00.000-08:00

Don’t stare at the wall too long every day. You’re using up life.

Don’t waste the ocean by staying at home. Wave after wave, it keeps coming in, with or without you. Be there for it whenever you can.

Spend a little time with the plants in your neighborhood.

Break your life into the smallest possible pieces, just big enough for a meal or a walk around the block or two pages of Leaves of Grass or “The Road Not Taken.” Just small enough for finishing.

While you’re waiting, learn one new word or a stanza of “Ars Poetica” by Archibald McLeish or take one photograph out the kitchen window of your house, your cubicle at work, the top of the tallest building in the closest big town.

Use the spaces in time.

Change your oil when it needs it. That dry grind you hear means it’s too late.

Do your laundry before you run out of underpants--or buy three more pairs at RiteAid.

Make your bed as soon as one foot hits the floor. It creates a center of order.

Burn this list. Make your own.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Unlearning Hate

2011-01-11T03:01:00.000-08:00

As one who has lived in and loved Tucson, Arizona, and the rare desert it dwells in, I became a citizen again during the horror and darkness of these past days. Beyond the tragic events, the newsreels, updates, statements, hospital reports, heroism, grief, terror, and in the midst of the crime scene, I struggled with Hate.

As a student at the University of Arizona in my mid forties, I was mugged in that very Safeway parking lot. Out of the shadows, Hate rushed up, grabbed at my purse, and threw me to the ground. I fell on the bag, bruised in body and spirit, and my attacker crept back into the darkness without any gain. It was hard not to reflect his face, his disregard, his feeling--that arrow aimed at me.

I drove to a nearby coffee shop, sat in a booth, sobbing. A woman came over, a nurse. She sat down beside me and talked me out of the shock, dipped a napkin in the glass of water someone had brought me, wiped my face and arms and hands, and said, “These bruises will heal. It will take a long while, but they will fade.”

And they did. And the man’s face faded, and so did the incident, which I hadn’t thought of for years until Saturday morning, when Hate came again to that parking lot.

Hate has had plenty of time to grow since my small incident. It’s taken on many aliases in the years that followed. Mostly, it has become a master of denial. “Not racism,” it protests. “Not bigotry or prejudice.” It whines on. “Not ignorance or greed.” Under its breath, it protests that it is not even its own name. It’s moved into neighborhoods, groups, corporations, even into the heart of our political structure, our world reputation. It steals from the hungry to feed itself. It never counts its money because it knows it will never be enough. It breeds. It knows well the arts of deceit and doublethink. Echoes of Orwell.

“Not I,” I say. “Not mine,” I protest. “I am not part of that, and it is not part of me.” But like the tango, it takes two. Hate must see its reflection in my eyes, for I know Fear, the son of Hate. Hate must sense, too, what I do not acknowledge in myself. And thus our battle continues.

From the shambles of lives lost and the sound of shots, from the quick response and the risks to reach the fallen, from the child born on 9/11 and taken on this infamous day, from the hearts of an astronaut and a compassionate Congresswoman, what do I take away from my citizenship in a city of shock?

I can pick up the cloak Hate dropped as it scurried back to the shadows. That’s my first thought.

Or will I choose to draw a line and refuse to cross it? To unlearn hatred and step aside from its arrows poisoned with fear? To watch them fall as though they were flowers. To tend the bruises and watch them fade without rancor or return.

I choose to draw that line. It will be a fine line, wiggled a little to read “Hate stops here.”

Do I have the strength for that? Do you?

How To Live in Nature

2010-12-13T07:43:00.000-08:00

Dig up the moonlight

over the grizzled green plant,

stink weed, grown out of dark loam.

Leap the boulder and run

like a hunted deer.

Stand under the thunder

and yowl a coyote howl

that ripples, like heat

over a dry lake bed

before the annual rain.

Stretch, scratch, fumble

like the slow-moving porcupine

as he rolls along night’s edge,

hunting.

Grunt like the javalina

rooting for food.

Shudder under the eagle,

you small bird, and the hawk.

Let the sun’s hot kiss

ignite the vision

of every place you’ve ever loved.

Be the earth, be the soil

you are made of, the water.

Remember, you come from the dust

of stars.

Photograph by Luna Zeffer

Letter Perfect

2010-12-01T17:24:00.000-08:00

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."--Martin Buber

Guggenheim Foundation, New York City

Dear Ms Zeffer:

We at the Foundation realize that you have not applied for a grant from us, so this letter may surprise you. We are offering you a $75,000 grant to do with as you will. We have been following you on Facebook, where you have expressed a sense of urgency and a longing to finish something before you die. Since you are 72, we agreed that we should contact you rather than waiting for you to apply.

Facebook led us to your blog. There we read often of your two-year road trip and something of your spiritual path. We hope you will use our grant to repeat your road trip, doing it this time as you wish you had done that first journey. We'd like to see a book come from that.

We will also provide you with letters of introduction and credentials so that you may visit the great spiritual centers throughout this country, where the serenity and order will allow you to catch up with your writing as you go along.

Although it is unusual, we would, in addition, like to provide you with a new Dodge van (we believe you prefer blue) and a full setup of camping needs from sleeping bag to stove.

We wish you well in your journey. Please do acknowledge the Foundation in any book (or books) that result from your use of our grant.

PS The Obamas would like you to stay over at the White House for a week or so, at your convenience.

Photograph, "Convergence," of the open road and the obstacles alongside, by Luna Zeffer

Geography Lesson

2010-11-24T09:27:00.000-08:00

I live in Cloverdale, where the magma in the mountains to the east is close enough to the surface to boil up enough steam to light the Golden Gate Bridge. Mist trails over the Russian river for miles on gray mornings, after the sun has begun to burn the fog away. Two trails--a shady creek-side path past the little waterfalls that ripple down Porterfield Creek, and the bald, paved climb to the water towers, through madrone and manzanita--lead me away from the clutter of the village. In the summer, heat is the secret shouted by the weather as it presses into the skin. Snow a few times a year for an hour or two crests the hills to the east and the north. Thunder storms through like a herd of buffalo while lightning cracks its whip. During the winter rains, the river rises out of its banks.

Nothing much happens here, we tell the tourists. We don't mention the weather, where the poems come from.

Photographs of patio garden and hill beyond, where the seasons play, and of the Russian river in flood by Luna Zeffer

One Thing I Know for Sure

2010-11-13T02:14:00.000-08:00

I’m an editor, and I know how to fix what other people say so it says what they mean to say, and how to tell an obstreperous author to go sit on a tack, nicely. I know how to handset type, and I’ve memorized all the boxes in the California job case, and all the fonts, and I know why serif type is more readable than sans serif. I’ve been scurrying around words all my life.

My own words were muffled in the din, backed up for years behind the dam of other people’s. Now and then a poem trickled out and, one leaky year, half a novel.

I’m retired now, finished for the most part with the dusting off of words. Mine are bubbling up. The dam has huge bulges, and it roars at night.

Photograph of composing sticks by Luna at Iota Press, Sebastopol, California

Sabbatical: October

2010-10-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

In October, I will breathe more often and never open my email until noon. I will go to the ocean once a week, and I will eat and pray, if you want to call it that, in accord with my 12-step master plan. I will write every day for at least 15 minutes, possibly 15 hours. I will walk. I will practice compassion, beginning with me.

I will read voraciously after cataract surgery and two months of impossible glasses, with new lenses freshly ground. I will say “no” at least as often as “yes.” I will submit to new sleep patterns—and several pieces of writing a week to my very favorite sources of reading pleasure. I will make up for lost time, put my closets in order, and take on no editorial jobs that take longer than 3 hours. I will come out of October well read, rested, thinner. Oh, I’ll be perfect—at last!

It's a Dog's World

2010-10-04T02:03:00.000-07:00

Don’t worry about the world ending today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.--Snoopy

Nathan Hess, my favorite philosopher, began at five to collect his thoughts. He read, and continues to study, the work of Charles Schulz, that calligraphic line of broken smiles and tousled hair, that dog wisdom and bird joy and 5-cent psychiatric help we know as Peanuts. I suspect others I’ve never met have in their homes a room called the “Snoopy Room,” filled with books and original cartoon cels and stuffed versions of all the children, dogs, birds that inhabit Schulz’s vision, but I’ve seen only the one in my friend’s home in Austin, Texas.

Because I know and love the man, I took my friend’s passion for the cartoon thoughts of Schulz and his creations as richly meaningful, and I could see the depth he saw in them out of the corner of my eye. In Austin for visits, I slept in the Snoopy Room amidst the crowd and the shelves of books, Snoopy Monopoly, clocks, statuettes, models and drawings--the various memorabilia collected over long years. It was sweet sleep.

This weekend my friend and I and his whimsical, grounded, always surprising wife Lisa visited the Charles Schulz Museum, gift shop, ice rink, and Warm Puppy Café in Santa Rosa. My friend had visited many times, avoiding the museum—or maybe saving it, always, for the future. How wonderful to find there what he has found in Schulz’s work—the moral compass, the What-Life-Is-All-About guidance, the human creativity and frailties as seen through dog, blanket, the music of Beethoven, curly hair, a cluster of birds, a typewriter perched on a doghouse roof, a snatched football, a night view of the universe while counting stars.

No problem is so big or so complicated that it can't be run away from!— Linus

Even the wood in its construction—chosen from among the trees that grow in Minnesota, where Schulz was a child—brings to this museum the warmth and care of its founders and docents. My friend was at home in the understanding and expression of Schulz’s philosophy, and he was by turns the five-year-old reading the early collections of strips and the man who has used what he saw in those panels to make sense of his own adult world.

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right? –Snoopy

We stood in the replicated studio with drawing board and library, family photographs, the artist’s “tools,” and watched a video of Schulz at work, commenting on each character as he sketched, how they came to be on the page, who they were and what they represented in the Peanuts legendry. The few lines, and those that were not drawn, to keep things simple. The few brushes, pens, with Schulz commenting that he’d never had much of a write-off for supplies. The books that supported the world he created—texts on the planes of WWI and the French Legion; Shakespeare; several copies of Gatsby, a book he loved. Nature studies. A biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. The collected cartoons he admired—from Thurber’s New Yorker half-blind scribbles to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat to Bill Mauldin's front-line WWII epic panels. History books and art collections, fiction that enlivens the era Schulz represents, memoirs and biography of the witty, the Warren Commission’s report on the Kennedy assassination, and much more. Reading that library, including the leather-bound collections of the Peanuts strips, would leave one wise.

Dear IRS, Please remove me from your mailing list.—Snoopy

One wall holds the work of Christo—plans for the wrapped doghouse where Snoopy lives (mostly on the roof) and works on his novel, starting over again many times with that indelible first line, “It was a dark and stormy night….” The doghouse is where he entertains (or perhaps at times tolerates) Woodstock (yes, named for the Event) and the flock, where Charlie Brown faithfully delivers Snoopy’s food bowl to his delight or complaint.

The finished Christo work, a gift of Christo and Jean-Claude, juts out over the first floor gallery, whose end wall holds a floor-to-ceiling work by Japanese artist Yoshiteru Otani. The ceramic tile mural is made of 3588 Peanuts panels, mostly daylight scenes. The few dark, starry nights form the image of Lucy holding the you-know-what for Charlie Brown just before she annually you-know-whats it as the NFL season opens. Another wall holds Otani’s Morphing Snoopy, a wood sculpture revealing the changing image from dog dog to the joyous dancer of our time.

In another gallery a wall of comics that inspired Schulz begins with the cover of a book about how to draw a cartoon that was a gift to him at age 11. One area offers an interactive children’s nature-study area filled with strips that focus on the environment. Near the research library, an entire room for children brings the study to the child who explores its wonders.

Try not to have a good time . . . This is supposed to be educational.--Lucy

I’ve visited only one other museum that brings so vividly to life, with such respect and understanding, the subject it celebrates. In Memphis, the National Civil Rights Museum, which I had never heard of before being handed a free pass along with my ticket to Graceland, occupies what remains of the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was assassinated, with the balcony, his room, the car in which he arrived parked below, all intact. Beyond that wall lies King’s history and the history of a movement. A lunch counter scene with a TV above the sit-in setting plays live footage from the occupation. Rosa Parks’ bus allows one entrance; taking a seat activates the conversation between the bus driver and Parks as she is asked to move to the back and says no. The Birmingham jail cell from which King wrote one of his most famous letters is wholly replicated.

I've developed a new philosophy . . . I only dread one day at a time.-- Charlie Brown

As with the Schulz Museum, we see below the surface of a historical moment into the sources and manifestations of a philosophical unity that sustains that moment for us. As I watched my friend shift from child to man and back again, observed the artist at his drawing board, read the quotes that lined the walls--both Schulz’s and those who honored his work--I’m glad I was there. I’m glad that most newspapers are repeating the entire oeuvre of Schulz day by day, and that what his artistry has to teach us is as fresh and enlightening as it was before the ink was dry.

Photograph of Nathan Hess and friend by Lisa Hess. Snoopy’s image, drawn by Charles Schulz, comes from free clip art on the Internet.

Jeny and Her "Ampie" Gail: Their Coastal Wander

2010-08-31T23:26:00.000-07:00

I was the last stop at the western end, the turn-around point, of Jeny's first solo cross-country journey. After a couple days of catching up and immersion in my daily life--a meeting of my writers' group, a 12-step gathering, a hike in Cloverdale's "wilderness area" with friends--we headed across scenic route 128. The curving road is a slice, a cross-section, of the California landscape: bare golden hills with live oak and shadows; woods of manzanita, madrone, dogwood in the spring and the spectrum of autumn leaves in the fall; long stretches of redwoods; the smell of the sea. We planned to spend a few hours at the Mendocino Botanical Gardens. We stayed all day.

Another cross-section of California's variousness lay before us--from the tended succulent gardens to cactus and heather to woods and stream and bog and all the way to the headlands above the ocean, where Nature had done all the planting. Sea grasses. Wild flowers. Little paths winding out to the Edge for the overlook. We were guided to wander through the open house filled with begonias in bloom, fuschia hanging above us. The rose-colored begonia had the same name as the wine we had just tasted at our winery stop on 128.

The seasonal spectacle of the day was the dahlia garden. Every color, all of the brightest range, circled the green grass lawn. No pastels here. This garden shouted "summer."

This fine piliated woodpecker seemed to pose for us against the overcast sky of late afternoon.

Echoed in the scatter of sea grasses, the sea sound:

the wash and splash of the waves below us.

After a river view dinner, we checked into the Surf Motel, whose gardens nearly matched the formal sanctuary where we'd spent the day.

Next morning, the fog was heavy over the Mendocino Headlands; the spring fields of wildflowers had faded to the soft beige tones of summer under the heat of the days when the fog dissolved or moved back out to sea. I discovered the macro feature on my camera and came in close to the velvet cat's paws.

Our stop for a roadside picnic gained each of us a "life bird," one seen for the first time. On the huge rock islands in front of us, we could see nesting colonies of murre (my first sighting) and pelagic cormorants (Jeny's ). Through her scope we could see the nesting mothers feeding their largish babies!

We spent the afternoon along the lake at MacKerricher State Park, north of Fort Bragg, walking along the lake shore, then over the boardwalk to Seal Rock. Ground squirrels scurried about their business as though they thought themselves invisible to the human traffic. Across the water, harbor seals, nearly white as albinos, lolled on the rocks.

Jeny managed a shot through her birding scope with the camera, a vision that seemed very old somehow, as though it might be an illustration for Moby Dick.

Home then across route 20, as splendid as our drive from Cloverdale. This road tucks itself between walls of hills and stone all the way to Willetts. We drove south to Ukiah, to the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, where we bowed to the Buddha.

As we left the ground to the shrieks of the resident peacocks, most rainbow-splendid of feather, a few all white, we were witness to the mating dance of a male, whose fanny shook like a fan dancer's.

The object of his effort strolled by, seemingly unimpressed.

The next morning, Jeny packed up Cricketeer and headed east on a route through more national parks, wilderness areas, the homes of Chicago friends, headed for her own new home in Kentucky, where she and her partner Mike have new jobs. Jeny is teaching Earth Sciences to eight graders, with fresh visions of the beauty of the planet, American-style.

Photographs of the rose begonia and the resting seals and the peacocks by Jennifer Gail Randall. You'll find Jeny's journal of her journey at http://cricketeer2010.blogspot.com. All other photographs by Luna Zeffer.

Eight Little Girls and Their Flying Nets

2010-08-30T16:12:00.000-07:00

The thirty crepe myrtle trees in the parking lot at Furber mall have begun to bloom, branches thick with clusters of red violet. At their feet, agapanthas begin to fade, their long stems drying in the late summer heat. What’s left after the purple blossoms drop and seed are the stems, tough and fibrous, drying to a metal sheen. Those stalks of the lily-of-the-Nile are beautiful in baskets--flat silver rings, two rows wide, woven in with the binding mariposa stitch.

Goodbyes come early this year. Autumn must be just over the hill.

I remember the school-year Saturdays in the early fall when the Camp Fire Girls in my hometown sewed the softest net into the shape of wind sockets, attached them to the handles of used-up brooms, and headed out for butterflies. We were learning their names—the tiger and zebra swallowtails and the little white cabbage that fluttered over the finished summer gardens, the monarch, and the luna, that swallow-tailed soft green moth seen only on summer screen doors, drawn by the light, and never caught. Too rare for capture. Too beautiful.

We plucked milkweed along country dirt roads as we gathered our prey, opened the net with care into the jars of chloroform we carried. The butterflies’ brief lives ended there, cut shortsomewhere in the natural two weeks’ of their generation--their flight. We moved on to use them, poised on a bed of fluff we had dipped in sky blue dye or tinted pink for the setting sun. Tiny dried weeds we’d picked along the roadside lay on top of the soft backing, perches for the butterflies.

Under the glass of an old picture frame, we had made a tray with a country scene delicate as a Japanese print—all for the cost of a frame, a piece of glass, a little dye, and the small creatures whose names we would never forget.

Memory seals, along with the scent of drying weeds and the dust of a country road, the passage of those tiny flutters of life.

Catechism

2010-08-12T10:47:00.000-07:00

I have swayed on the back of an elephant

And now you want me to climb on a jackass?

Try to be serious.—Mirabai

In the explosion of the still and small

in the country church,

under the pounding childhood words,

the windows, stained-glass and sturdy,

blossom to roses.

In the candlight of midnight on Christmas Eve,

the flame walks out the door with me,

under the ringing carillon,

into the first snow,

every single flake, cold, burning.

iii

Under the Northern Lights in our town,

my father’s finger points

to what is unknown.

He tells us what science thinks.

His telescope sights on the rings of Saturn

and a visible galaxy or two, Andromeda,

and the craters of the moon.

Questions, he said, are more important

than answers. Not I am, but who am I?

What lies out there beyond

the blue planet’s spin,

this place we call home?

Who among us is made of light?

What percent of the human body is water?

How does the electron dance—particle, or wave?

Why does the drum beat?

What spreads sun into rays over the pines,

circles the moon with an aura?

Why nine months? Why four score and ten?

Where do you go when I shut my eyes?

What have I done? Forgive me.

Roll Call in the Utah Desert

2010-08-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

I smell the sun on my blue lizard back,

move not at all, flick my eye

when cloud passes over

the dust of my gray hill

at the foot of the Henries,

sere, dry, still…

wait, something…

I scurry.

They call me sidewinder.

I slither sideways.

If you lift my rock

I’ll be gone, angular

and fluid as water

that once flowed

in this yellow arroyo.

I am the mule deer with long ears

who lives in arid lands

too hot for humans to walk.

When the spring rains surprise me,

thunder across the sky,

the Fremont runs red as rust

from the sand of Moenkopi,

that red pavement of the desert floor,

eroded by light.

I am asleep

when the first wave comes down the river,

a line of dry juniper berries

marking the rush over the top of the water.

I leap up at the ruckus.

I jump away from the cliff base,

my green bed, into the water,

into the flood of fear and the roar,

to cross, to cross to the flats

on the other side.

I can’t swim. Here I am, floundering.

I float downstream, gain a hoofhold,

leap free.

You won’t see me. You may see

my lion scat, my long tail

as I blur away from the canyon

as you trail in.

Elusive, I am. Power

is my nature. Raw meat

is what I eat, wild and hungry.

I am slinky, sure of foot,

leaving the print of my paw

in the mud by the river,

no tracks at all on the arid

emptiness I travel, the vast.

I sit in the waterfall

made by the engineers

where route 24 curves

through Capitol Reef.

I let it pound me

in the high-noon heat.

My skin reddens

from sun and water.

I smell the alkaline soil

and the heat of the lava rock,

black now for millenia, as it turns

from its mountain bed

near the crater, basalt,

white where it stayed in place

in the soil,

its round face to the sun.

I am the silence,

even under the waterfall.

Photographs: Capitol Reef by Wolfgang Staudt; lizard and mountain lion courtesy of National Park Service; Fremont River falls by Colin Guthrie.

Through Another's Eyes

2010-07-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

This is why I woke early: to sit tall and alone in the desert; to understand that I am not separate from the vastness that surrounds me, from the ancient seabed that supports me; to sit open eyed and open-hearted to what this landscape has to offer—patterns of light and shadow, unwary movements of animals, the slow passage of time. This is the second gift of the desert: Solitude.--Jennifer Randall

This summer, my niece Jeny blogs as she makes her first solo cross-country journey (you’ll find a link to Cricketeer on my “I follow” list to the right). In her classes in environmental studies at Antioch East, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, written assignments were seen as “creative writing,” not merely “reports.” She wrote essays about lichen, vernal pools, a Manhattan “green” market, in the language of poetry. She brings that same voice into her blogposts as her world widens to, first, the big farms of the Middle West and then to the grasslands of the plains, the back country of the Rockies, and the arid lands we call “desert” in the Southwest.

Between 1996 and 1998, I made a similar voyage in a driftwood-colored Dodge van named Willa II, almost twice around the United States. Jeny, insomuch as she traces my tire tracks from time to time, rouses my love for the road, and my memory wakes up. Jeny, at Capitol Reef, explores the heart of the country of my heart, describes a desert shower that might have been a flash flood, basks in the flow of time.

I remember, years ago, my friend Moh--a musician/songwriter from N. Carolina—and I spent 6 (platonic) weeks at Capitol Reef. We stayed in Teasdale at the red-rock four-room schoolhouse friends and I had bought, three rooms still under a leaking roof, one dry and facing the view. We could see for 150 miles or more, from the irrigated fields around us, across the Waterpocket Fold and the Henry and LaSal mountains beyond, and into Colorado, where on a clear day, we could spot Mollie’s Nipple, a landmark for pioneers on their cross-country wagon rides--considerably slower than Jeny’s or mine. (Once, flying cross-country, our pilot announced, “Starting right now, I’m counting a minute. I’ll be back.” We waited. “Folks, we’ve just covered so much country that it would have taken a wagon train ten days to cross it.” A fine lesson in time, space, and willingness.)

Moh and I went out every day to the places I knew. My friend Mark Larsen took us by Scout, four-wheel driving, into places I didn't know. On a dirt road—actually, a couple tire ruts through the South Desert—Mark found the unmarked side ruts that interrupted the high plateau we drove across. We descended to the Dirty Devil river through various layers of canyons, across more and deeper plateaus and into even lower canyons, surreal from beginning to end. The land was opening itself, and we were traveling through a crack as the landscape repeated itself at each layer: new canyons, new plateaus, and, on one wall at river level, a perfect watermark in the shape of the head of a deer. The river at the bottom was gray, and even its slow, muddy flow broke off its gray sand walls in chunks—more silt to thicken the dense water.

While Mark and I waded in temporary quicksand up to our thighs (firm riverbed beneath, although we never knew for sure) Moh climbed a cliff above us with his recorder to compose this Place. As we slogged through the quicksand, more alert than I have ever been, we could hear him shaping flute songs about the river and the wind, songs that caught the silence, too, between notes. (Weeks later, back at home in Berkeley, Moh brought the music and his recorder and we played the composition, written for two instruments. Though he had not yet heard it except in his head, the two notes we played created, between them, a third unwritten note, a whisper of the indescribable.)

We built a campfire that night and slept on the shore. The gray sand was firm, and our fire perched above it, separate, as though a Surrealist had painted it. All night the sides of the creek fell into the river, kerplunk, kerplunk, and the stars were as bright as I've ever seen them. Not much sleep among the three of us, listening, watching, deep in the canyon the river had cut...

***

In Berkeley, back then, before we head out, I spend a month preparing Moh to face the summer heat of the desert. There is no water, I say, except in the rivers, which run low in the summer. It will be over 100 every day, I tell him. Minimal clothing with a long-sleeved shirt over it but long pants for the avoidance of thorns. Dryness will creep into your bones. The heat will expose you to all the borders of yourself. Your ears will fill with biting gnats that you can’t swat and their singing in the silence.

That summer, though, rain falls for many days. We sleep in the back of the van in the Blue Hills of dust in the vastness at the foot of the Henry mountains, out where no campgrounds would think of living. Lightning flashes all around us, so close that we can we see it strike. We can count no time between the flash and the thunder. As we drive, over every cliff wall tumbles a waterfall. We watch flash floods at every bridge we cross, whole cottonwoods afloat, and juniper berries a long black edge of every wave. We fear sometimes that the bridge itself will wash out as we stand on it.

At night we sit, warm and dry, in my VW van. He plays the guitar and teaches me Carter Family songs. We sing harmony, as though practiced professionals, in a perfect blend.

We camp along the Colorado then, in the dry heat I'd promised, and at the Great Mistake, Lake Powell, at the foot of the damnable Glen Canyon dam, and swim from a rented boat under spirals of wind-carved rock. The desert lake is starkly beautiful, even if you know the magnificence of the canyon it flooded. (They said then, those who protested the damn dam, that it would silt in and be useless. Perhaps not so blatantly as the Dirty Devil, which flows at its confluence into the Colorado, the wide interruption of the river that sculpted the Grand Canyon has indeed begun to thicken.)

Then, under the heat, skin heavy under the weight of sun, we head back to the Reef, to the end of one of the few canyons that cut through the Fold, to a valley that contains the summer hunting grounds of the Anasazi. The walls hold their petroglyphs, their “blogposts,” left 1200 years ago. We wade in the creek at the foot of the cliffs, in the afternoon shade.

For an eloquent vision of the destruction of Glen Canyon, see Richard Shelton's long poem "Glen Canyon on the Colorado," in Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah's Wilderness, first published and distributed to all members of Congress as they debated the fate of these lands and available here and there as a Milkweed Editions publication.
Aerial photograph, Waterpocket Fold, by Bobak Ha'Eri, September 14, 2008

Sherman Alexie Says...

2010-07-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

..in the opening paragraphs of his recent book, War Dances, a collection of short stories about contemporary Native American life:

"Back in college, when I was first learning how to edit film--how to construct a scene--my professor, Mr. Baron, said to me, 'You don't have to show people using a door to walk into a room. If people are already in the room, the audience will understand that they didn't crawl through a window or drop from the ceiling or just materialize. The audience understands that a door has been used---the eyes and mind will make the connection--so you can just skip the door.'

"Mr. Baron, a full-time visual aid, skipped as he said, 'Skip the door.' And I laughed, not knowing that I would always remember his bit of teaching, though of course, when I tell the story now, I turn my emotive professor into the scene-eating lead of a Broadway musical..."

I've just pulled out the splintered manuscript of my first novel. It's two years beyond the bad joke I made when it was 21 and "old enough to drink legally." It's 23. It deserves a life of its own. I'm attending a local writers' group tonight for the first time. Most of the writers in the group are working on fiction or memoir, and I'll be working on the albatross...uh, novel...as we move along. I'm also registered for an online class with the superb teacher Jordan Rosenfeld for an eight-week session on "Making a Scene." That's the flaw, I think, in the manuscript, the injured wing that keeps my albatross from flying. As much as I can, I'm clearing the decks of other obligations and responsibilities so that I can use the next few months to finish the thing. If that doesn't work, I'll invite you all to the bonfire.

Alexie is one of my favorite writers. His ink comes from the heart. He creates a modern American, often urban, Native who leaves the reservation for the city. His humor is rich, his insight deep, and his language luscious. Anything he's written is Recommended Reading, on my list!

Beyond the Wave

2010-06-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've seen Dave Martin's image of an oily wave crashing to the shore many times in the past weeks. The wave has been posted again and again by those who see it for the first time. In my mind, each time I see it, another wave crashes on yet another shoreline, in that continuity of sea that we consider a symbol of the movement of the vast. I am overwhelmed by its horror--and its beauty.

If even the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico cannot wake us up, I wonder if anything will--except, in some last moment, the truth of our own extinction.

The stories of our fate are so dire (and fairly immediate) that they are hard to absorb, even for those who care, as many Native Americas do, about the Seventh Generation, about those who are to come, and about the nature of our own present human community. For the greed-driven, who appear to care for little beyond their own life span, our fate seems cloaked in denial.

The possible tainting of all the oceans in the world seems to me to be sufficient call for change, for spiritual engagement (whatever that means to each of us), and involvement within and of the collective of which we are a part. Interconnection is undeniable; we see it in all of nature. We see it more clearly today in a rapidly diminishing diversity of species, the broken links in the chain of life, the torn web.

Buddhism describes the world--the universe--as a jeweled net, with a jewel at each intersection of the weave of the netting. Vedanta captures in three words that sense of oneness: "That Thou Art." The Lakota Sioux end each prayer with Mi taku oyasin (all my family). The acknowledgment of our universality is common parlance among us.

The potential of using that interconnection is now made visible to anyone who has any familiarity with technological wonders such as the Internet.

Spiritual engagement, to me, doesn't mean choosing an organized church or temple or synagogue and going there on Sunday (or Friday, or whatever day the sect requires), though for many this remains a significant and meaningful act. For me, it means cleaning up my own life to the best of my ability, with the help of what might be called a Higher Power: a circle of friends, a god of one sort or another, a scrapbook of family memories, a teacher--secular or spiritual--of tested truth and value, the love of a child and love for that child. Whatever, that is, that holds me to the center of my life.

Engagement is the important word to me. If my life is in order and "working,"--that is, if I have time, energy, and willingness to give of myself--then I am returning what I am being given. Giving, in this sense, is not a conscious action: it is merely the natural Way, the flow of human activity.

The other day, my Taiwanese restaurant-owner friend showed me her philosophy with a simple turn of the hand. Palm up: you are asking something of the world, wanting, desiring, acting from the hope for personal power and from greed, the seeking for gain that makes our "society" operative today. Palm down: you are giving out whatever you have to give. That is your work, and you will be supported in it. A Taoist view this is, but one common to most "spiritual" paths.

Perhaps we need a new word. Spiritual, to me, assumes interconnectedness--the net, the web of all sentient beingness. It does not imply some link that comes only with being human. Spiritual may be tainted by its association with religious, which has come to mean, in our times, the practice of a set of chosen values associated with a sect that defines a god as “only this.” Such practice, in my view, narrows the definition of Higher Power. It creates a box. It measures the meaning of God (to use a common name) to worldly values, the goals of greed, the lust for power. It divides the meaning of “only” into “this” and “not this.”

Big words, these. Big abstract words that don't illuminate the everyday, the intimate, the warmth of deep relationships, the gestures of art and music and poetry toward describing what's out of the box.

My God, if she/he/it has a name, is “Only.” All. With a name come edges, limits, boundaries. Another step beyond name is Nameless. The box dissolves.

A friend of mine reports a conversation she once had. Someone said to her, "I wish you would teach me to think as you do." My friend asked what that meant. "You think out of the box." My friend replied, "What box?"

Drawing by Hokusai (1760-1849)

Satellite photograph by DigitalGlobe (June 15, 2010)

Confession

2010-05-22T23:42:00.000-07:00

after Wang Ping

At 71, fat, with a disorderly kidney ready to die . Sitting too long in one chair . Computer on . facebook . twitter . blog . gmail . email . video poker, and I never lose . Try the casino? . Make a flyer for Mei’s Tian Yuen, Vietnam house of noodle soup, to post on the front door, side door . Watch Jon Stewart and Dr. Strangelove . Hershey bar. Clark bar from the candy specialty shop . See’s raspberry cream . Cheese danish . 2 a.m. and the goat up the hill bleats and the great horned owl in the pines hollow-hoots back . Chocolate . Hot chocolate . It’s a merry-go-round . The rooster up the hill wakes up and lets it be known . Catch the brass ring for a free ride on the wooden horses . A Fifth Avenue bar, chocolate melted and hard again against the wrapping, gray from too much sun in the 7-11 . A little walk . Needles in at the acupuncturist . Drastic measures . Hershey bar . Write a poem . Brass ring . A food plan . A walk, maybe 15 minutes, by Porterfield Creek . Stepping in . Group . Sponsor . Phone . Cook . Nothing but vegetables, grain, 4 ounces protein, fruit, until it tastes good . Is . Is enough . Ray’s 6-foot x 4-foot x 6-foot-high stack of sugar bags next to the bakery, next to the candy aisle . Grit teeth . Walk by . Make a daily list . 143 things to do, starting with prayer . Checkmark . Write a poem. Walk with Mei to the top of the broken road in the wilderness park behind the senior retirement community . Mei says China! looking across the green mountains . 10 pounds released . Go home . Write a poem . Cook an asparagus bunch . 7 grains from Trader Joe’s . Fresh petrale, 4 ounces, on sale at Ray’s . Write another poem …

Photograph by Karl Frederick

Shredded and Restored

2010-05-22T21:59:00.000-07:00

Hierophant: Ted, Bryan, Shooter, John, Bobby

I’d listened to Black Ribbons a good number of times, including the clips and bits that showed up in bootleg videos and audio, before I held the CD in my hands and unfolded the complex cover: a murder of crows, a dotted line linking a greedy man to a trusting child, and the words to the childhood chant I’d said automatically until a few years ago, when, for the first time, I listened: Row, row, your boat/gently down the stream/Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily/Life is but a dream.

What I heard only recently in that little tune was a distilled message, passed on in song from child to child, a time-bomb of a message that can be deciphered only by the experience of life, whatever that may be, as it explodes into the awareness of illusion. Not the trickster Illusion, whose sleight-of-hand reveals itself in moments all along the way, but the illusory world whose details we all agree upon and hold in common as real.

In his new album, Shooter Jennings sets off that bomb. From the warning “Wake Up” call of the first song to the expansive horror and potential for salvation—a heavy word, to be sure, but it’s suggested in the music itself—the songwriter lays out the whole agony of contemporary civilization. His exposé of society’s underbelly is poignant, terrifying, and heart-rending. Interlaced with his dark-side wanderings, he sings of his love for his daughter, his woman, and the circle of loving friends that has become his trusted world.

I stood at the foot of the stage last night in San Francisco, a few feet from Shooter on one side and, on the other, Ted Russell Kamp at the bass, a soulful trumpet, an achingly moving guitar. Between them, where my view was clear and the drum set was close, Bryon Keeling created a steady song-sound of rhythm, blending the group into unity, as he had when those three were part of the original .357s, before Hierophant came into being. The two “new guys,” with their healthy egos firmly tucked in their back pockets and not on display, are already part of the blend. John Schreffler, Jr., who dazzles at lead guitar, and Bobby Emmett on rockin’ keyboards, hail from Michigan, where they were high school friends.

In the end, the story-line tragedy the author Stephen King relates, in the guise of a DJ on the last night of free speech in a country that could be almost any country, reaches its foregone conclusion. I found myself moving to the rhythm of King’s words as I had to the music. When hope is lost, the music grieves, lashes out, then frees itself and begins to soar. Within the shelter of sorrow, triumph begins to move, and compassion. In the near cacophony of sound, I heard celebration as it might be echoed in some royal wedding at a cathedral--Westminster, perhaps--in the high arches of its ceiling.

These may be lofty words. But how else can I describe what I heard and, more, what I felt as I stood in the midst of din made harmonious, deftly structured, borrowing (and celebrating) musical influences of a lifetime? As I watched five musicians in accord with the music and one another. Laughed, cried, trembled in fear, felt heartbreak and praise. Both hands on the stage, I felt the rumble of sound as much as I heard it.

I’ll never listen to this music again without being there, with Shooter and Hierophant, somewhere beyond illusion.

Another View: The Responsibility of Self-Publishing

2010-04-20T23:47:00.000-07:00

Jordan Rosenfeld, a writer and the author of Make a Scene, a remarkable guide to novel writing, is a teacher of writing both in live workshops and online. She speaks with authority on matters of authorship and publishing on her website at http://jordanrosenfeld.wordpress.com/

Recently Jordan posted her thoughts on self-publishing, ruing the fact that so often self-published books are raw, unedited, and might never have seen the light of day had they not been published privately by the author. Hers was a thoughtful perspective and set me to thinking.

I have edited a number of books privately, before a publisher is involved, for people who have treated editing as though it were proofreading, accepting the changes that fixed commas or spelling and rejecting any further editorial guidance. They pay me, thank me profusely, and ignore what I've done. I wonder why in the world they pay an editor to do a proofreader's job! It would be a lot less expensive to hire a proofreader and let the editor use her time for the real work of editing. Perhaps I do not make clear what I see my role as an editor to be.

Many of these books have been published and are deservedly well received. In some cases, matters of consistency, structure, overall style--simple style, not the writer's "voice," which a good editor will recognize and enhance--are not considered. My name is attached to some of those books, and it's embarrassing. Other writers don't do that much--don't hire an editor at all, or maybe have two friends read the manuscript, people who love their friend's book and pay no attention to (or don't recognize) the problems it presents. Those books don't sell, even through self-promotion, and nobody picks them up for wider publication.

In most discussions of self-publishing, matters like these are seldom part of the conversation. I think that's why Jordan wrote the article. I jumped on it from the editor's point of view as worthy of thought. I wasn't making a case against self-publishing. Nor, I think, was she. I believe a writer has a responsibility toward a manuscript. Not editing it at all, sharing it with a friend or seven and considering it "edited," or hiring an editor and not thinking through the editorial work with some dispassion are, in my view, not meeting that responsibility.

We all know how difficult it is to edit one's own work--to see beyond what has already been done in a way that allows for constructive change. The wonder of the way a writers’ group can work together in critiquing a piece is what makes for growth in the power of the writing of all its members. As trust grows and the ability to critique deepens, creative revision becomes more possible, flexible, and effective. We as writers become more astute at "letting go" and remaining open to accepting fresh ways of seeing what we've written--and also more adept at recognizing what doesn't work for us without any need for defense.

The same might be said of the exchange between writer and editor. Personally, as an editor and as a critic, my first rule is to remain true to the voice of the writer, which means that I first must recognize it, identify its qualities, defer to it, and, ultimately, enhance it. Second, I make sure that any client of mine is made clearly aware that any editorial change is a suggestion, not a compunction, and that often my change may not be the one the writer will adopt. Almost always, though, an editorial suggestion may point out that something is amiss, and it's up to the writer to solve that issue in his or her own way. To my mind, observing those two rules is what gives value to the editor's work. Not all editors are able (or more likely willing) to do that.

I toss Jordan's piece into the ring of consideration not because I'm not a whole-hearted supporter of responsible self-publishing but because I think it represents a missing piece of the debate.

There's a lot of crap out there, and a lot of it is self-published. When I first became involved in small-press publishing in the mid 60s, that wave was just beginning to swell, and it was exciting in every aspect. I was (in a support capacity as editor at Glide Publications) one of the organizers of San Francisco's first small-press book fair, where the broad range of what was being published became visible to the public—and surprised the publishers themselves with both content and quality.

Small-press publishers took the responsibility for editorial quality. Work that might never have been seen was being revealed, and the craft of it was considered part of the revelation. The distinction was that small presses could and would consider work that a large publisher (and those were, at the time, primarily in New York) would not see as "commercial." Presenting that work in its best form, editorially and design-wise, was considered part of the integrity of publishing.

Writer and press worked together more closely in the small-press world than was possible with any large press--the writer had a say in design and production as well as in matters editorial. In particular, the sensitivity of writers outside the New York perspective was defining itself. Writers visiting from the East Coast began to understand and appreciate the work of West Coast peers and were able to more clearly define their own perspective. In many ways, that was the best of my editorial life.

The small-press movement in the 60s created an arena for writers and readers who wanted to read to create and read books not watered down by a mainstream publisher with profit in mind. Its offerings broadened the market. Right now, I believe, there's a resurgence of thoughtful, caring, chance-taking small presses. They present, in publishing for the love of the book, a middle road between "commercial" publishing and self-publishing. They offer reasonable distribution and publicity while maintaining a level of quality worthy of a professional work.

Certainly, many fine books have been self-published, the best of which have set their own standards for presentation and met them. Virginia and Leonard Woolf and their Bloomsbury group represent, for me, the high-water mark. The Woolfs published, at their Hogarth Press, their own work and that of their friends and their friends, including Vita Sackville-West, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Robert Graves, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, Laura Riding, and John Crowe Ransom, and many others, often for the first time. In the broadest sense, their work could be seen as "self-publishing." They were publishing their own work and that of those in their circle. But what standards!

The Tale of The Tree, and Its Death

2010-02-21T21:53:00.000-08:00

Once I lived in a little blue cottage behind a big blue house and under The Tree that grew over the backyard fence. So big was that tree! It held the nests of most of the birds in the neighborhood. The mockingbird who lived in its branches sang exactly at one every spring morning—for almost an hour. First, he rehearsed the scales and little studies. Then he practiced his full repertoire, loudly, for the rest of the hour. Each night, after his concert, I fell asleep.

The woman in the front house and I often admired The Tree—how supple it was for its size, and how, in a coming storm and at the height of it, each of its branches danced as though to a different wind, the heavy limbs the adagio against which the allegro of its twiggy shoots flailed.

And then one day I came home and it was gone.

I found the woman in the front house in tears. The hole the missing tree left in the sky was huge, and I cried with her.

She had spent the morning trying to save its life. She’d run to the back fence to ask the choppers and trimmers and haulers-away on The Tree’s home plot what the hell they were doing. She’d called City Hall, traced the little lines of diminishing hope from desk to desk, voice to voice. No one was able or willing to stay the execution. And so she had watched the fall of The Tree, its dismembering. She’d seen it on loaded, in pieces, to the bed of a waiting truck, which drove to the street and around the corner and was gone.

That night, I fell asleep at nearly two, in the silence of the treeless mockingbird.

Once, not long before, a thousand birds had lived happily in the huge tree, scrapping only occasionally over a nesting crook or a sunny limb on a cold day. The songs they sang were many and various, as individual as their feathers. Some—the mockingbirds and thrashers--tried to learn the whole songbook, which only The Tree knew by heartwood. I’d hear a little tittering in the branches when the divas, those mimics, struck a wrong note in an aria—added a warning call in the midst of the trills of a warbler’s seduction, or a jay’s insistence to a song sparrow’s flurry. Yet those virtuosos, in spite of their mistakes, were to carry on the oral history of the entire flock, to remember all the music and all the singers and their mythologies and to repeat and repeat them so they would never be lost.

And then one day in this revolving future, when their home was felled, everything went--nests, sleeping perches, leaf rustle, star shine broken by the branches that went swinging in the wind, even a few unhatched eggs. Nestlings, who had never yet considered flight, flew on wobbly wings. And the elders lifted off in every direction, looking for other trees. After a few nights most had nearly forgotten The Tree. They had winged their way into the smaller oaks and Chinese elms and tall firs in the neighborhood—or even farther away. And the singing mornings, the wakeup calls, were still, and the night’s town crier no longer singly shouted the news in all the voices of the flock.

One night not long after the fall, that chattering historian returned to a tree near the vacant place in the sky and continued his nightly rounds through the legends and witticisms and challenges and griefs of the flock, remembering everything as perfectly note-by-note as he could, and the night sounded, from my cottage, almost the same as it always had. And then the songs grew shorter, a note or a phrase lost. And the music dwindled into a mere medley of the leitmotifs of the full symphony. The pauses at the now-forgotten bars grew longer, and the scrambled plots, confused. The inheritance so carefully rehearsed each night became a gesture, more silence than song. The sorrow in the voice of the bearer of the tales became a tattered requiem, as memory and instinct failed him. Finally, one night, the maestro flew away mid song, his white bars brilliant in the moonlight, and he was never heard again.

I became, by default, the keeper of the legends, if not the music, of the Tree, because I had lived a long time under its branches. Only now am I writing what I can remember from so long ago—more silence than song, more generic than each of the stories was. And I, too, am losing the traces--the last memories of what The Tree always recognized: that all the legends were telling the same story of how things are and then, at last, are not.

Following the Drum

2010-02-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

Respect the ground, respect the drum, respect each other.—Abe Conklin, Ponca/Osage (1926-1995)

When I pull into the campground in the Badlands of South Dakota, it’s almost dark. I make a cold turkey sandwich and a cup of camomile tea on the Coleman stove, roll out the sleeping bag on the blue three-fold futon on the platform in the back of the van, then sit at the picnic table as the final light fades. It seems to rise again. Over the warped and shapen hills to the east, the moon, a day or so past full, comes up, over the tents and trailers around me. Others are looking up, and I can hear soft voices, wordless murmurs. In this gray landscape, illumined with light, I feel at home with my fellow travelers, safe.

***

It’s been a long day, which began near Wounded Knee, where I stood alone at the graveyard marked by an obelisk of names—Chief Big Foot among the fallen. The names of those massacred at Wounded Knee on December 28, 1890, read like poetry:

Bear Woman, the oldest woman in the band

Mr. Red Fish

Mrs. Trouble in Love

Whirl Wind Hawk

Not Go In Among, son of Hailing Bear and Her Good Medicine

Pretty Enemy

Horned Cloud

Trouble in Front, son of Shedding Bear

Cast Away and Run

The fence around the mass grave is laced with ribbons—red, yellow, white, black—the sacred colors of the four directions. They flutter in the the soft wind. The dry creek that once ran with blood traces the worst of the battle scene as though it still flowed. I stay as long as I can. I can feel the battle raging, the screams of massacre.

I pass a herd of horses, and then a hill covered with pickups and horse vans and many people looking over even more horses. A sign says HORSE SALE. I don’t stop.

I turn off the two-lane road on the Pine Ridge reservation to a village called Porcupine. Square reservation houses line the main street, the only street. I stop for a Coke and drive on to the end of the town road, which dips down into a park. I can hear a drum. I go on down the hill and ask the first person I see if this is a public event. “Oh, yes,” he tells me.

I walk closer to the round drum, huge as a table, with seven men around it, all beating it in rhythm. One man begins a whining chant, almost in falsetto, and the others come in, like voices in fugue form, repeating the chant and turning it upside down against itself. I’ve heard this music, minor and and wandering, before, at powwows, in big cities. Here in this tiny village in a vast landscape, I can hear where the music comes from, rising from the earth like the desert stirred up by a dust devil, holding the deep snows and the relentless heat of summer on the plains, the moon I saw at the badlands, the agony of lost homelands and interrupted lives. The joy of the steady beat of the drum under it all, and how that works its way into the songs of rabbits, journeys, storms, the history of the history that these songs contain. The banner on the makeshift stage says PORCUPINE SINGERS. I stay as long as I can in this personal space of the Lakota in celebration of who they are.

***

I can’t leave the Dakotas. I backtrack, going back to the places I’ve been. I head west again, stay a night, turn back to cross South Dakota, go north to Bismarck, North Dakota, for the International Powwow I’d decided not to attend. During the Intertribal dances on the first night, I make a circle of the powwow grounds, stopping to listen to each drum until I find the one I’d like to be close to. Several draw me, but I want to make the full circle. The last drum is the Porcupine Singers. For the evening and then for two more days I sit in the low bleachers beside them. We don’t exchange a word. They bring me back to all the wilderness I’ve known. I feel Utah’s oppressive heat, see again in my mind’s eye the coil of the Milky Way across an ebony sky above the distant song of coyotes, echoing now in the high chants of the singers.

From others who return to this drum, I hear a little of their history, learn about the drum keeper, who never leaves the drum alone, who, when he must leave, assigns someone to keep the drum while he is gone.

On the last day, I stay to watch him tend the drum. He lifts it into its huge leather case, rounded to fit it like a jacket. He gathers all the drumsticks. He lifts the round lid of the drum case and sets it in place. It doesn’t drop on. Here and there it buckles on the rim. I am sitting close enough that I could touch it with one finger, giving it the steadiness it needs to fall into place. Without a second thought, I touch it, and the lid slips on. The drumkeeper lifts his awkward package and takes it away. When he comes back, he wraps the drumsticks in leather and ties them, carries them away. He comes back, looks around the space where the drum has been to be sure he has missed nothing. He stands still, looking at me, and says, “Thank you.”

He returns to the drum.

***

Back home in California, I make my way to the first night of the Stanford Powwow, which I have attended many times. As I walk across the field to the powwow grounds, the announcer says, “Our Southern Drum will sing for the Grass Dancers. Welcome the Porcupine Singers from Pine Ridge!” I run.

When they take a break, I stop one of them who brushes by me. “I am so glad you are here. I’ve heard you twice before, at Porcupine and Bismarck.” Immediately, he takes me to the lead singer and introduces me, invites me to sit under the canvas canopy that covers the drum and a few chairs, with his fiancée. For two days, he invites me again to the shade of the tent.

On Sunday, his fiancée tells me that a special dinner will honor the Southern and Northern head drums, and the singer would like me to go with them. We meet and walk along the tables full of salmon, chicken, roasted vegetables, fruit, and we fill our plates. The singer is interrupted by people who come to talk to him, always with a handshake. She and I find a table and begin to eat. He comes to join us. I turn to ask him a question. She touches my wrist, stops my sentence. “He is praying,” she says.

He invites me to come back again to Porcupine. “Just ask,” he says. “You’ll be able to find us.” To my surprise, he gives me a strong hug. The walk across the field to my car is a long one. As it was with the Dakotas, I don’t want to leave.

***

Badlands National Park landscape is a National Park Service photograph. You can listen to the Porcupine Singers at www.myspace.com/porcupinesingers

Clown/Zen: Mr. YooWho, Dancing in Joy

2010-01-13T00:15:00.000-08:00

Late in December, Moshe Cohen, a rare clown known as Mr. YooWho, who illustrates the paradoxes found in Zen with every movement in what becomes a long dance, inhabited the Noh Space Theater at San Francisco’s Project Artaud, a warehouse artists’ residence/performance space. I had seen him only in YouTube snippets. Live, in 3D, his clown gifts explode with magic—tenuous balance, acts of resistance in the empty air (a suitcase will not move out of the space it wants to occupy), talks with a cocktail glass and a windup plastic penguin, nonwords and French phrases, music from a disembodied Above. Chants. Juggling. Whirling hoses that sing on key.

Through it all, his collaborator/accomplice, Theater of Yugen’s artistic director Jubilith Moore, slips in and out (ostensibly invisibly) to clear or deliver a prop, a role known formally as Koken (the Stage Assistant) in the highly refined Japanese theatrical tradition of which she is a flawless practitioner. She grows bolder as the performance goes on, her hand extended now from behind the side curtain in a silent demand that the clown use the prop she hands him or rejecting his next move with her still, nearly motionless stance of refusal.

In his SF Weekly review of Mr. YooWho’s Holiday, Silke Tudor says, “…Cohen, while blending the seemingly disparate arts of Yiddish absurdism and European buffoonery with Japanese butoh and kyogen…has the heart of a poet and the eye of a monk.”

The performance continues, playing itself over in my mind. I think of the constancy of motion, the implied stillness, the loss and regaining of balance, the specific magic and the way the whole performance become magics. The permission to respond. The intimacy of Mr. YooWho’s coming into the audience. The repetitions, like motifs--the immovable suitcase, the "errors" made with the same precision as the "successes," the wonder of the children that becomes the wonder of the adults.

Giggling. Tears now and then. The beautiful golden thread of a sidekick weaving, through flowers, balloons, music, and all the other forms of celebration brought alive. The joy in every turn, every change, so that there is no-thing but present time, presence. Color. The "third characterness" of that Above that sang and spoke and was music. The Tibetan-monk depth of the off-stage chant of the clown before he emerges onstage.

I love the music/object connection, how the Above begins its music with the lifting of a suitcase or a small kitbag almost arbitrarily, and, when the clown tries to repeat the gesture consciously, the music ends. Moshe comes back to that moment again and again when I thought he wouldn't any more. How it all comes out of one suitcase--endless variations and his sweet cohorts, the glass and the penguin. How the clown gives everything life and speaks with each object of creation, so that all things become sentient.

The freshness of it all, as though it is happening for the first time, and I am allowed to see it and then to let it go, in the way that you can't hold onto the notes of a song as they pass by….

You can learn more about Moshe Cohen’s sacred mischief at his website at http://yoowho.wordpress.com

You’ll discover there that he was the founding director of Clowns Without Borders USA, a group that has performed in Guatemala, Chiapas, Nepal, Kosovo, Sudan, and Haiti, in displacement camps and at war-torn sites where laughter had been nearly forgotten. He now travels widely, training clowns and those who would train clowns, teaching workshops and performing along the way.

Alas, you’ve missed his San Francisco shows this time around. You can find a few minutes of his performance at http://www.yoowho.org/gallery/gallery.html

Moshe Cohen is currently writing a book for both the professional who takes clowning seriously and for those of us who’d like to clown around more fully and spontaneously in response to what arises in the daily “now” of our own lives. He’ll provide exercises to help us all do just that. I’ll post the publication date here. Be patient.

Photos: Mr. YooWho’s portrait by Peter Cunningham; Moshe departing by Shawn Harris

Sunset in the Bear Paws

2010-01-12T12:46:00.000-08:00

Our going was with heavy hearts, broken spirits. But we would be free….All lost, we walked silently on into the wintry night.—Wetatonmi, Nez Perce

The low sun tints the foothills of Montana’s Bear Paw Mountains gold. A cold late-day wind kicks in. The winter grasses, dry and pale, quiver as I take to the trail through the camp of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, past the surveyors’ iron stakes that mark, by name, the placement of the tipis of his fallen warriors. The wind rings in my ears like the whinny of horses, as though the herd of 400 Appaloosas that Joseph drove toward Canada still reels with the shock of artillery and the scent of blood. In another gust, the cries of the 600 women and children who traveled with him, the sharp yips of the camp dogs. Forty-two miles from Canada lies this battleground, so close to freedom.

I am alone in these foothills. I hurry on to the ridge. Boulder-mounted plaques tell me the story as I go, a narration on stone of what happened here. Over this crest, the Army thundered, by trick and surprise, ending Joseph’s run, the four-month chase longer than any other that had stymied the American command. Joseph’s strategies and those of his fellow chiefs would soon be taught at West Point.

The blood is gone, sunk into the grasses and the deep ground of time, the horses long scattered. The field of slaughter is empty. To the west, the sky is slashed with orange as I come down again, through the camp of the conquerors, the same iron stakes bearing their names, and into the gap where the last plaque stands.

Weary after a march of 1800 miles and more than 20 skirmishes with the Army, Looking Glass, Joseph’s principal strategist, had called for a rest before the final stretch to the border. Looking Glass was killed in the battle, as was Joseph’s younger brother Ollokot, and Joseph went alone, on a horse he had no doubt borrowed, to give up his gun and surrender. In trade, he was promised a return to his homelands in Washington State for himself and his tribe.

The letters on the last plaque seem to shout his words in the near dark, though he had spoken them softly, almost unheard. Where I am now, he stood, and he spoke: From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.

No return was granted, and Chief Joseph died, they say, of a broken heart, after exile in Kansas and then in Oklahoma, where his tribe had been shipped by rail. His death came at Colville Reservation in Washington State, as close to his ancestral lands in the Wallowa country, which had been returned to the public domain, as he was to come.

The grasses here at Bear Paws Battleground are let to grow, a small space where the native prairie grasslands will claim a stand.

The sky is gray now, with the promise of snow. I drive back to Chinook and slip into my room. I toss in the night toward the south, toward the Bear Paws, then turn back to my time, the red glow of the neon MOTEL sign outside my window pulsing, the scream of horses at my back.

Photo of Joseph (Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht , or Rolling Thunder in the Mountain, 1840-1904), by De Lancey Gill, 1900

How To Read a Poem

2010-01-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

First, read the words on the page. Pause. Read them again.

Then, if the poet’s voice is not yet singing in your ears, read the poem aloud. Observe the line breaks gently but don’t be afraid to rush on if you want to get to the end of a thought without pause.

Now, lay the poem aside. Go about your business. Try not to think about the poem, but if it rushes into a corner of your mind as you are typing your lesson plan or walking five miles through the city or making orange chicken with a side of curried cauliflower, notice which words have survived.

Come back to the poem. Put on your parachute. Be prepared to start on the ground, go up in the air, all in logical procession, then leap into what you did not expect--the air of loose connections, the passion of falling. Allow for conclusions that decide you into a place that lifts you out of the poem and into free fall.

Where in your body did you feel the poem? What memory leapt first into your thoughts, evoked by the poet’s images? Say aloud what you think the message of the poem was. Recognize the poet as messenger who brings your own life to you in different wrappings.

Rest. Turn to the next poem.

Photo: Sky Reflected in Tide-Wet Shore, Bolinas Bay

Year's End/Year's Beginning

2009-12-22T22:20:00.000-08:00

Friends, Let Us Celebrate Together...

...the Returning of the Light

My heart is filled with joy, when I see you here, as the brooks fill with water when the snows melt in the spring, and I feel glad, as the ponies are when the fresh grass starts in the beginning of the year.

I heard of your coming, when I was many sleeps away, and I made but few camps before I met you. I knew that you had come to do good to me and to my people. I look for the benefits, which would last forever, and so my face shines with joy as I look upon you.

--Ten Bears, Yamparika Comanche

Tea and Empathy

2009-12-17T01:44:00.000-08:00

Nearly a thousand people waited in a light rain outside Santa Rosa High in Santa Rosa, California, last Saturday evening. A volunteer walked alongside the crowd, distributing tickets for the book signing that would follow the speech of Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea and the recent Stones Into Schools. When she passed me, the ticket giver was offering ticket number 250 for a place in another line at the end of the evening. For Mortenson, who had spent two hours talking with students and their teachers in the afternoon, it promised to be a long day. He had come to speak of peace and his passionate belief that education, particularly that of women, is the imperative first step toward resolving conflict in the Middle East.

Mortenson, who cofounded the Central Asia Institute and Pennies for Peace, has been honored with The Star of Pakistan--the country's highest civil award--for his sixteen years' work there, promoting education and peace.

I made notes as he spoke, in a dim corner of the auditorium and in a field of awe. If I have misrepresented the speaker in any way, I take full responsibility for the scribbled error.

Mortenson was as genuine, open, shy but relaxed on the stage, rich in his storytelling, as he is in his books. His words strike the heart. I cried when he told us about the Independence Day parades in Pakistan. He asked us to think of a parade in the U.S. on the Fourth of July. In Pakistan, the widows of soldiers who have died in battle come first. War-orphaned children follow them. Then come the wounded, followed by the young soldiers still active, and the parade moves on.

He told us about children's nonprofits that have grown out of a his foundation's project called Pennies for Peace. One 11-year-old in Florida, not satisfied with just bringing pennies to school, started a foundation he called Little Red Wagon. He walked from Tampa to D.C., pulling his little wagon and raised $78,000 along the way. He intends next to walk from Tampa to LA and wants to raise $1 million. He called Mortenson and said, "They want me to have a board of directors. What does that mean?" They talked awhile and then the boy said, "Can I have kids on my board?" His advisor said, "I don't think there's any law against that in Florida." Now, all Little Red Wagon board members must be under the age of 18.

Another 17-year-old went to S. Africa and saw that there were no playgrounds. He started a nonprofit fund and built four playgrounds/soccer fields and is presently building 12 more in S. Africa, Kenya, and Uganda. Someone asked Mortenson recently how he monitors all these programs. Who administers them? He said, "We don't. The kids do it all themselves. At this point, much of our support is coming from kids."

Most surprising to me were his comments about American military officers. General Petraeus wrote to ask if he could visit one of his schools, and did. Even more impressive is Admiral Mike Mullen, who has made Three Cups of Tea required reading for his staff and and others in the Pentagon. This week, he will meet in Afghanistan for three days with village elders. Mortenson pointed out that when Secretary of State Clinton went to Afghanistan, she stayed a few hours, as did Vice President Biden. Both met during their visits with government and military officials in ceremonial meetings. Neither spoke with the tribal elders nor met with ordinary Afghani citizens.

He said that for the question-and-answer period he wanted to answer the question that would no doubt be asked by anyone who first raised a hand (big laugh from the audience and the nodding of many heads). This is what Greg Mortenson had to say about the current situation in Afganistan and Obama's decision to increase troops there.

All the meetings between Obama and his advisors were held in secrecy. There was no public debate, little input from Afghani specialists or other public experts. The decision was made by the president and his military and governmental advisors alone. Mortenson felt that a much broader group should have been consulted, and he felt that 50% of the decision should have been made by the Afghanis, with respect to what they wanted and needed.
About half of the 30,000 will be trainer troops, Mortenson has been told. The Afghanis have said, in general, "We don't need your fire power; we need your brain power. If something needs to be done that requires battle, we will do that. We need you to help us set up systems, educational opportunities, to help us reorder our country."
Further bombing will create only enmity. The Afganis want no more civilians killed. If the bombing continues, nothing will change.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan you must meet with the tribal elders if you expect to make any change at all. Nothing will happen unless such relationships are established--over three cups of tea. The power to make change does not lie with the government. It lies with the village elders.
The military now is far ahead of the State Department and the administration in understanding that "no military solution is possible in Afghanistan." (Mortenson is quoting the many high-level contacts with whom he's spoken and who have asked to consult with him.)

Mortenson is utterly unpretentious. He is witty, sometimes bringing his audience to laughter, often through their tears. His sincerity is palpable. When he asked how many people had read Three Cups of Tea, very nearly every hand went up. He got a long standing ovation as he walked onto the stage and a longer one after his closing remarks.

Seldom, in my experience, do heroes turn out to be truly heroic when seen "live." Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber, stumbled down K2, lost, into a Pakistani village, where the family of the village chief took him in and cared for him until he regained his health and his bearings. With no idea of how he would do it, he promised to build a school. A nurse from Berkeley, California, he had neither the money nor the knowledge of how to raise it in order to realize his promise. As an author, a builder of schools, a man who honors the crowds who come to hear him by signing books to the point that he must wrap his hands in ice, Mortenson, who represents what one person can do, far surpassed my vision of hero.

Another Harvest

2009-11-22T19:43:00.000-08:00

for Mike Tuggle, poet laureate

of Sonoma County, 2008-2009

after his Healdsburg City Hall reading

Let a poem write you.

Remember, if you are still alive

time’s on your side.--M. T.

My heart, greedy as a seventh sense,

combs the vineyards, waits for a hawk

to float-three flaps-float over the rows

of winter-trim vines, turning now--

here, maroon, yellow, there,

and on the foothills above the valley crops,

crimson, lit orange in this late midwinter light

moving toward darkness. We’ve passed

the drunken season of harvest’s dregs,

when the unpicked bunches melt to wine:

bitter air over the highway. Now

only splendor roams among the twisted grasp

of color grabbing stakes to stand,

the hawk rising under the settling light.

You’re an old man, limping with a new knee.

My feet drag, won’t lift when I walk. Yet

your words, carved from the rich debris

of ocean, love, the hills of Cazadero,

of the poet’s lonely, lovely life, strum

to my heartbeat, a bloodline back

to memory, my self as a wild child, free,

fleet in meadows of timothy on an Ohio farm.

I want everything you said:

a housepainter’s soprano singing for him,

an Okie’s dry retreat to California,

trading walnut trees for oaks,

the body of shadows that cover the hills.

I want all of my life, my debris, still gathering.

She Lived in Retreat

2009-11-14T20:27:00.000-08:00

She lived in retreat

from her too-good child

and the woman she supposed she would be

in the jumpers she made,

the same Simplicity pattern varied

in color, print, the weight of the weather.

She longed for belonging, rebellion,

that two-sided coin she could toss

that would name her a diviner.

She believed that everything—where the ferns

grew in Golden Gate Park near the swampy fens

and the water lilies, St. Matthew Passion on Sunday

while the brutal gospel of the black Baptists

across the street rang in the windows—

all was right and good. Evil

was someone else’s fairy tale.

She loved to stretch in the sleepy morning

into her life of surety and meander

She woke—I woke—with a tab

of Owsley in the bedroom upstairs

when the walls fell, the ceiling was sky,

and the trip to the ocean that followed.

I saw the cricket at the edge of the universe

ready to leap and, when it did,

stood on Roethke’s three stairs in space,

watched the fall of faceted forms

that met facet to facet and then fell away,

the embroidered figures of lovers and fronds

and gold pistils and stamens—

Persian miniatures, I found at the library later.

Never seen before now.

And the ocean, where I could see

not only the seventh wave but the six

before it, and the six

gathering in the outer swells.

Looking up from the grass that day

where I lay in the park of the wobbly present,

I heard the counsel of azaleas above me,

the ageless momentary flower,

the accidental bee,

the one petal falling.

Night Walk West of the Tucson Mountains

2009-10-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

Over the owl-call road of Grant’s Pass out of Tucson, beyond the city lights, where the saguaros can see the stars from their desert circles, the wind lives. Some nights when the pavement stays warm under the moon, tarantulas cluster along that route to slumber in the cool night air, and the ocotillo wave furiously with every gust.

If you walk out there in the dark, you’ll see the air open in front of you to let you pass, and if the wind is right and strong enough, the saguaros will sing to you, that song you can make with your breath over the top of a Coke bottle to remind you later of what they sang.

In the silence, you can eavesdrop on every thought the desert has to share, and what, I wonder, do those chatterers hear from us? Heartbeat? Breath caught in awe? Our river of blood?

A lone plane rends the sky with sound. It passes. The desert lets down its guard, settles into the depth of its stillness, and begins to speak again. Dry arroyos whisper the history of their streams, broken rocks remember their boulders, and we passersby ponder who we are.

Looking for Nothing, In Particular

2009-10-17T22:25:00.000-07:00

…oh my desert, yours is the only death I cannot bear.—Richard Shelton

My fourth-grade geography book defined desert, as I remember, as a place of nothing. Already, I began to long for it.

When my young husband wrote from his Army post in Utah, he said, “The desert is beautiful. There’s nothing here.” And then, from that emptiness, though we had decided I would stay in Ohio for his two years, he said, “I’m coming to get you when I’m on leave in December.” I began then to dream actively of nothing.

In the drive across country, space was unleashed. Ohio, familiar, stayed about the same all the way to the border. Indiana stretched, and Illinois yawned. Beyond that, every mile shattered into vastness, and we grew silent in the passage. A fire across the plains was visible for half an hour as we approached and departed. The Rockies were in sight for hours.

We came into Utah from the north, into the Wasatch Range and the first Ponderosa pine, the car doors’ slam reverberating in the echoes of the canyons. We stood at the point where Brigham Young stopped to say, “This is the place,” as he looked over the valley of the Great Salt Lake, before he tasted its salt. We crossed the Jordan River and headed south through the irrigated world of green, the snow above us on the mountains, the sky so blue I realized that the Ohio sky I’d grown up under washed to faint color under the haze of the Middle West. I was waiting for nothing, for the desert with the face of Sahara.

Arid lands in America do not wear Sahara’s face except in the unusual: the red dunes of southern Utah, the dazzle of New Mexico’s White Sands, the lunar stretch between Capitol Reef and Green River with buttes eroded to goblins, and patches of the old undersea with its exposure of petrified oyster shells a million years old.

The desert taught me to keep an eye out for nothing and rest in what grows instead. I opened wide, and still I look for nothing at all.

***

One day, a six-foot tumbleweed in a strong wind in a town dump in the middle of nowhere rolled, stickers and all, right into me. As I plucked out its splinters, spread body wide, a friend comforted me. Crying, laughing, I heard myself say, “Don’t worry. It’s nothing.”

Learning To Spell

2009-10-17T21:00:00.000-07:00

Round on both ends and hi in the middle: OHIO!

I think I was born in my grandmother’s back yard, naked, and lying on a blanket, in Columbus. All the pictures show it, with Concord grapes twining over the back porch, the pie cherry tree crimson, heckled by blue jays, and four o’clocks, sweet Williams, and snapdragons against the fence.

Years later, in San Francisco, the managing editor of the publishing house I worked for, who had run away from Ohio when he was 13, said to me, “The great advantage of growing up in Ohio is that you know exactly what you must rebel against. Think how confused you’d be if you’d been born in California, where anything goes.”

I remember gentle, rolling, dairy-farm hills and no horizon to dream beyond. A one-building school for all twelve grades, where at night from the top floor you could see the lights of Columbus, 16 miles away: a suggestion of horizon.

The sky was black with stars and I learned their names through my father’s telescope. Sunday, we took long rides--up and down city streets looking for ideas for a house my family never built or faded barns that might be transformed into a home. In the fall, we drove to the state parks of southern Ohio, with cliffs and waterfalls like footnotes once I saw the mountains of the West and Utah’s red rock cliffs.
Ohio welcomed putting one foot in front of the other for a lifetime, nuclear families that never exploded into the wider world. We fell in small creeks in the winter when the ice didn’t hold, past snow drifted six feet high along roadside snow fences where the snow still blew over the slippery road. We celebrated summer strawberries and pumpkins in the fall with annual festivals in the town park. We had only one sport—basketball—that once, during my school years, took us to the state championships to win.

Then came the journey West and the California world at full speed: the opera and the coastal redwoods, seabirds and art museums. Season tickets to the Repertory players and the ethnic meals of a hundred geographies. Rock bands in the Haight Ashbury. Protests against the war. The common grief of AIDS.

In later years, I left the city, looking for Ohio, the safe and stable home of my childhood, in a small town in the north state, where I found vineyards, not dairy farms, and redwoods, not white sycamores along a slow creek. I found again the simple cadence of learning to know a landscape, a small town’s ways, the gathering of friendships without any hurry. In California, I came home again to all I’d run away from.

Luna Speaks Her Mind: Letter to Editor

2009-10-10T02:05:00.000-07:00

I am delighted that President Obama has been honored with the Nobel Peace Prize he so fully deserves. His return to diplomacy and negotiation as viable tools in a troubled world is sufficient for this award. Not for many years has this country engaged openly (nor perhaps even secretly) in partnership with the world community.

Obama’s presidency is too often evaluated by looking at what hasn’t happened. His first year was one of undoing, tackling economic problems and wars he did not create, reevaluation--with wise advisors and with regard for his critics--our foreign and domestic policies and turning them toward peace and prosperity.

Wars and economic crises are not built in a day nor has any leader in history resolved them in so short a time. Obama has moved on every front to calm crises and introduce reform. Yet we expect wars to end, Wall Street to behave, and instant prosperity—in just over a year!

Let’s judge less on expectation, look freshly at Obama’s international stature and how he is altering world opinion about America. He has taken many first steps. Let’s give this honored, honorable man a chance to complete his work before we judge it.

Dust

2009-09-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

“…the tendency of interstellar dust to more strongly scatter blue starlight…”—a NASA report

…is love entering the picture as though it belongs,

its sparklers, its booming fireworks blooming out of the dark,

a name to repeat on the phone-side doodle pad,

a charm, a quark, an irreducible absolute.

Its scientists hold a magnifier,

probing for something smaller.

…it’s a bomb in a war in the gut of a man and a cry

that wakes a dream, a broken silence, a silencer.

A call to arms and a call to put them down.

A ray of hopelessness flailing like prairie grass

in Nebraska wind. It follows a foregone conclusion

like the blown fluff of milkweed shimmering in sun.

…it’s something about the formation of stars

in the emptiness between the emptiness.

How galaxies collide, suns die,

how You are the Milky Way, the scattered blue

nebulae, the solar wind, the silence

within the Silence, here, right here,

in this spinning blue world.

Yes, We Have No Bananas

2009-09-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

Columbus, Ohio, lay in the landing circle of Lockbourne Air Force Base, home of the Strategic Air Command during World War II. I was five when my bed roared with the passage of heavy bombers in the night, and my legs ached so hard that I called for Mother. She sat on the edge of my bed and massaged my legs with peppermint oil. The smell of war.

The list of daily tasks taped to the icebox door had changed from “Brush your teeth” and “Make your bed.” “Knead the oleo” was my call to break the orange bubble of dye in the plastic wrap of white butter substitute and massage the mass to yellow. “Weed the vegetables” sent me out to the Victory Garden that filled the corner of the backyard behind the swing set, modeled after Eleanor Roosevelt’s vegetable patch on the White House lawn. “Smash cans and ball the tinfoil” meant I helped build a plane at Curtiss-Wright, where my father wrote technical manuals and had a nervous breakdown.

Afraid that a manual he wrote wouldn’t be clear to a pilot fixing a plane fallen behind enemy lines, Daddy worried himself sick. He worked the night shift in an almost empty Quonset hut so as not to be around people, meeting with his boss in an overlapping fifteen minutes before his work began. At home, tucked into bed, I could hear his voice and Mother’s, rising and falling. Sometimes I heard him crying, her voice soft as a lullaby. The big planes going over covered my ears, and sometimes I cried, too.

Down the street at Beaver & Horne, the specialty grocery where my mother seldom went, bunches of bananas dangled in the window, too rich for the food-stamp allotment of our family, or the budget. A father no longer working, even at night, at home now, healing. My beginning ballet lessons across town cancelled for lack of gas.

Static-covered news of the world slithered through the night, voices of Churchill and Roosevelt and their cabinets cataloging success in battle, or loss. Limit travel, their words crackled, work harder to make ships, tanks, guns. Wad up more foil. Remember, Loose Lips Sink Ships and Uncle Sam Wants You. Contribute to the War Effort. On Friday I carried a dime to school for a War Bond deposit.

Mother embroidered skirts with nursery rhymes—“Ring Around the Rosy,” “A Tisket, A Tasket”--and sold them at a fancy shop. She made us summer dresses with the scraps. She sewed black curtains for the windows and waited for sirens. She closed the house up tight, pulled the black curtains and the drapes, turned off every light, not one lamp on, no candles, no flashlight, no little beam shining through a crack. Planes, our planes, sounded even lower in the dark. It was hard to breathe during blackouts.

More planes flew over our house, all the time now. My humid summertime naps were sleepless. When a tiny Cessna droned over the roof above my bed, that lazy whine of flight was filled, I knew, with bombs. If I slept, I dreamed of my father crawling toward me down the hall, and woke up screaming.

One day while my parents painted my bedroom walls sunny yellow, a message came over the airwaves. VJ Day! The war had ended! Out in the street, neighbor kids were blowing the horns of their family cars. “Can I, too?” I asked my father. He laughed. “Go ahead.” I honked and honked, yelling all the while, “The war’s over!” Down the street, Ronnie and Ernie yelled back. “We know it, Dummy.”

I found the Life magazine my parents had hidden. People like skeletons in striped clothes and piles of shoes, so many shoes. I cried until I couldn’t stop. Mother hugged my hysteria, said, “Yes. Yes. This is war. And it’s over now. The people have gone home again. Don’t cry, little one.”

Long after the ink dried on the treaty of surrender, I remember my father’s tears, the trips with Mother to sell the beautiful dresses, not for me. Overhead, still, the planes. The blackout curtains came down. We kept the Victory Garden. Daddy took a job baling hay on my uncle’s farm, laughing as he told me, “Good hard work like that make me feel really good. How about you?”

Dusting Off a Set of Childhood Books

2009-08-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

I read an article yesterday in the New York Times about Lorrie McNeill, a Jonesboro, Georgia, English teacher of seventh- and eighth-graders. Last fall, she abandoned “required reading” in her classes and began her courses by inviting students to read a book they loved. Some chose comic books or Harry Potter. A very few chose books by Toni Morrison and Ernest Gaines. As she observed their interests, she suggested books that might pique their interest, books requiring tougher reading skills and offering richer subject matter and literary quality. I loved her method.

I was "educated" in a country school in Ohio in the 50s. There were 16 students in my graduating class and almost all of them were in the third grade with me when I came to that school and for the nine years that followed. We learned parts of "Invictus" and a poem that began "...I meant to do my work today/but a brown bird sang in the apple tree." We read Macbeth, ploddingly, in senior year with no discussion worthy of mention. We wrote exactly one paper in four years. I remember Cotton Mather. I didn't know Shakespeare wrote sonnets until I was a sophomore at Ohio University. Before that, I didn't know what a sonnet was. We had one language, Latin, taught by a woman who didn't love it and whose chief effort to explain why we "had" to study it was that it would help us with spelling. I studied physics with a shy minister I could hardly hear, who didn't believe a word of it. For tests in that class, the boys put their books on the floor and turned the pages with their feet, and the shy minister was scared to say a word. So much for the core curriculum in literature and science.

My mother began reading us Alice in Wonderland before we could talk. My father inadvertently taught me astrophysics over a telescope in the back yard. We went to the library twice a week and came home with piles of books. I read all of the Hardy Boys and The Merryweather Girls at Good Old Rock Hill and the 20-book series of Nurse Sue Barton and even more of Nancy Drew, Detective. I read Little Women so many times that the librarian asked my mother, who was on the library board (of the smallest Carnegie Library in the world, a point of great pride) to buy me my own copy. She did. I still miss it.

When I was in 7th grade I decided to read the adult section of the library alphabetically until I had gone all the way through. I got to Dickens. I actually read every single word of James Fenimore Cooper and loved it. It was the first time I realized what language was all about, that the way a writer put words together could affect the story itself. We all read voraciously. Most nights, Daddy, Mother, and I sat in the living room and read. Before my little sister Lois could read, she sat there, too, with her little books, sometimes holding them upside down if they didn't have pictures in them. When she was five, she demanded that Mother teach her to read. Mother got flash cards and workbooks and taught her to read. I read in the sweet hay in the hayloft, the orchard, the empty corncrib, the bathtub, my bed. When my mother called me to help with the dishes and I didn't hear her, she didn't believe that I was lost in a book.

Most of the kids I went to school with didn't have parents like mine. Few of them were read to as children. They couldn't have chosen a single book they liked in a situation like the one the teacher in the article offered, but many of them would have responded if they'd had a little of the guidance in choosing that she offered her class. One boy graduated with me without knowing how to read. In a little farm town in the early 50s, you didn't fail a lad just because he couldn't read.

Not until my freshman year in honors English at the university did I know that a story could contain more than its surface tale. We had read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” which I found a gruesome tale of an old woman sleeping with the bones of her dead lover. My classmates delved into her symbolic value: the Old South slumbering in its traditions. My life changed that day in Dr. Whan’s English class.

With all the failings of my high school education, I took to it all with passion when I sat in that honors English class at Ohio University, and I made up for lost time. I was with the top students in Ohio because I had gotten 100% on the grammatical sections of the entry exam. That high school Latin teacher, who was also my English teacher for four years, didn't know what to do with me. I was bored silly. So she taught me on the side every bit of English grammar. She did not hand me Jane Austen or Puddin’ Head Wilson (I read that when my editor at my first real editing job in San Francisco sent me to all the vintage bookstores in town to find an original copy so we could do a facsimile). She handed me parts of speech.

That's why I got so excited about the article about learning to read by reading a book you loved. I think that teacher is probably doing more to teach her students to read and offering them the chance to stumble onto Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson in their own good time--because they have learned to love to read. That's what saved me. That's what got me to the point that let me recognize the beauty of what I stumbled on.

That, and a set of books with red pebbly covers called Childcraft, in 12 volumes. One volume held mythology--Greek, Latin, Native American, King Arthur. Another was all poetry. We wore those 12 books ragged, and were I to see that set today in some back corner of a used bookstore, I would buy it. It was where I learned to love to read.

An Evening in Healdsburg...

2009-08-03T11:47:00.000-07:00

First stop: A Thai restaurant for dinner beside a carved wood panel, dancing figures in prayerful pose...enjoyed a ginger-sauce dish with veggies and mushrooms.

And then a stop at the dollar store...

And out again to the sunset world...

...and Into the Night

2009-08-03T11:30:00.000-07:00

The burst of flowers resembling a Healdsburg garden spot is--whoops!--the last shelf of the dollar store. The backlit grasses are the real thing!

This fellow grazes along the Healdsburg sculpture garden near the Town Hall.

And this milker grazes the wall of the local theater, wearing a product code on her belly. A must-see movie, Food, Inc. may not teach you anything you did not already know, but to set visuals to the theories of Robbins, Pollan, and all the other wise advisors on the nature (or non-nature) of our food supply brings theory home to the gut! Brave are the interviewees who speak out about the control of Monsanto over their lives as farmers (and the very seeds of ours) or point fingers at the five meat giants who color our purchases. I left the theater reeling from the synchronicity of snapping dollar-store pics of skulls and fake flowers, an all-bones horse chomping at the missing grass, and dancers, Shiva-like, on a restaurant wall.

Finding the Way in the Light

2009-07-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality

in times of moral crisis.”—Dante Alighieri

When Barack Obama was elected president last November, a darkness that I had not known covered me, lifted. What a long night it had been. In the next few days, that darkness explained itself by its absence. I saw how I had been wrapped in the arms of fear: fear that was not my own, yet I had returned its embrace, owned it, joined it. I could not see its edges nor remember the light that fell just outside its circle. In those few days, fear fell away with the speed of light, like the shower of sparks from the wand of a good fairy in a Disney film, and was gone in a shimmer.

Stepping into the unfamiliar light of change and promise, I was blinded at first. The farther from fear I walked, the reality and the weight of what this man faced—and I and all citizens--became clear. During the Viet Nam war, I had taken to the streets in protest, watched the police on horseback corner a crowd in a dead-end alley in San Francisco’s financial district and beat them bloody with billy clubs. I sat in Kezar Stadium after a march from the Ferry Building with my elbows tight against my sides because so many of us were crowded together—far more than the capacity of the arena—and gone home to hear the news that about two thirds of that number had been counted. Those numbers got mixed up somehow with the daily body count.

The president-elect set to work long before his inauguration. As did his critics. And so a new war began, as in the tales of Tolkein—a battle between darkness and light. Before he took the oath of office, his critics destroyed the reputations of his appointees, shrouded his plans for recovery, defamed his name. I made a vow that for two years, I would express not one word of doubt or blame or difference. I am keeping that vow.

And what I have learned by doing that is to wait. An appointment I might have criticized and bemoaned, I let pass. I learned more about the power of fear as a tool and a weapon of distortion, of control, or manipulation. And when I waited, so often I saw the President’s reasons, how delicately he balanced on that fine line of honor that draws itself between the camps of chaos and the icy walls of habit.

Only six months in, his every action is greeted as “the final test of the Obama presidency.” His birth is questioned, and his preparedness. His wife is reduced whenever possible to a fashion statement, and his cabinet decried as agents more terrible than those who had preceded them. The mountain of problems he faces are made to seem of his own making. He is responsible for two wars he did not begin, a financial collapse he did not further, a broken regard for his country that he did not broker.

By this time, six months in, the previous administration, and perhaps the one before that, had begun campaigning for an election that would not take place for three and a half years. The business of governing the people was not the main player on the stage, but the election. We have grown dull in this country, I believe, because we are weary of political charade, of never-ending campaigns, of spending beyond our means.Through the manipulation of fear, we have been lulled into inaction.

Yet Obama carries on. Faced with the inertia of the-way-things-are and the greed for power, he does what he can along the fine line he walks. Where he cannot yet complete a structure, he builds a foundation. He remains present. And he waits.

And I wait with him. I want to consider what he has done rather than what hehas not. For the first time since Viet Nam, I want to take a stake in the political world and its ramifications. I want a voice, and I want to elbow my way into the arena personally. Toss a few cans in the food bank bin at the grocery store each week. Sign a petition, write a letter. Phone. Volunteer at the library book sale. Write a blog. Keep peace with my friends. Watch light fall on trees and the dance of the wildflowers my neighbor has planted in her garden. Trim the rosebushes, not by cutting their roots but by pruning their branches—all in the proper season.