Beautiful Dreamers

My process, in writing and life, has up until recently, been to make things more complicated than they need to be.  Sometimes I have presented my complications as art. Although I’m embarrassed about this, I have compassion for myself. I was lonely and needed help.  I craved human companionship like water, but there were things I had to learn on my own, without the comfort and reassurance of mirrors so that I could learn to see with my own eyes. At first I became more selfish. Every crow call I happened to hear was a message for my ears only, and I wanted you to know about it. Over time I learned to see how my impulse to share was founded on the need to be seen, not on a desire to see someone and else, which is what it takes to make a true connection. This shifted for me this winter without me knowing it. The shift came either through writing poetry, or I noticed it after in my poems. Probably both, which means I have entered the realm of relationship I longed for.

 Now that I see a bird and not a message, I am less lonely. In not needing to be seen, I see myself, and begin to ask forgiveness for my human arrogance that has kept me separate from the world. This is lucid dreaming I think. I am awake inside the dream, open to participating in creation, instead of thinking I can either control it, or have no control at all.

I once led a group into The Maze, a nature preserve on Block Island with serpentine trails where people who have hiked for years still get lost, for an authentic movement session. Authentic movement is a practice developed by a Jungian analyst to connect to the unconscious through the body. The work is done in partners, with each person switching roles as witness and mover. Starting on the ground, the mover follows the body’s impulses, while the witness holds the container. After the movement is complete, each person writes of the experience, with the understanding that, for the witness, everything written about the mover, is a reflection of themselves, and not just a statement about what they saw. Mover and witness have separate experiences that are also the same.

After we were finished I called everyone together to share their experiences with the group. One woman broke down in tears, telling us how she hadn’t touched the earth for years with anything besides shoes because she was so afraid of Lyme disease. Her grief was not just for this, but that, until she had sat down on the ground and touched it, she hadn’t even noticed.

How much are we not noticing because we’re afraid?  And why are we afraid? The earth meets all the needs of every other creature on the earth. Do we really believe that it’s not the same for us? I invite you to wake up inside the dream of a being without words, whose language comes from the sounds water makes over stones or falling on leaves, a dream that doesn’t need to be interpreted, all of its meaning unto itself.

Deepwater Wind

Note: versions of this letter have been sent to The Block Island Times and the the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I encourage you to write your own letter. The Army Corps of Engineers is taking public comments until Feb. 10. Please ask that a full Environmental Impact Study be done on the Deepwater Wind project.

I am writing to express my public opposition to the Deepwater Wind application to build a wind farm off Block Island. I have hesitated expressing my opinion in a public forum so far because, while I am opposed to corporate control of our energy, my primary objection has been emotional, grounded in what I at first thought was aesthetic dismay—I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing those windmills on the wild ocean, but which I realized on further contemplation was a belief that this wild seascape was sacred and should not be altered for the short term needs of humans in transition as industrial capitalism makes a last attempt to buttress a failing system that has put short term profits over the long term interests of all creatures sharing this planet.

From what I’ve observed about the political process in my lifetime, emotional reactions are usually more detrimental than helpful. However, after reading the letter published in last week’s Block Island Times by David Lewis, in which he eloquently merged his emotional reasons for opposing Deepwater Wind with the intellectual, I am moved to add my voice to what I hope will become a growing opposition before it is too late to stop this project.

As David Lewis said, many other voices have expressed their opposition for a variety of reasons. What I would like to add is a call to stand up for something sacred, which in my definition is something that should not ever be bought and sold. We are living in perhaps what is the end of an era where industrialized humans see themselves as the center of the world, a position of arrogance which we have used to justify ecocide and the genocide of cultures who live in closer alignment with Earth and its millions of other non-human residents than we do. I say the end, because there is a good possibility, backed up by scientific evidence for those who need it, that we are rapidly creating conditions which will be inhabitable to human life.

While green energy like a wind farm may sound like a solution to this problem, it must not come at the expense of the wild. As a student of permaculture I learned that sustainable systems are created by assessing the energy available in a particular place and then creating methods to channel that energy to meet the needs of everyone in the system—people, plants, and animals. Basically the way humans lived before industrialized capitalism took over the world, and a way of living in accordance with natural cycles so eloquently documented by Thoreau in Walden. Even in the 19^th century Thoreau felt a need to escape civilization, writing words that seem prophetic now as we face not only the destruction of our biosphere, but the destruction of the sacred in each one of us if we allow the wild to be destroyed. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau wrote, creating space for hope. It is my hope that others will join me in protest of Deepwater Wind, and in envisioning ways of producing—and consuming—energy that are truly sustainable and local.

In honor of the goddess Brigid

Unafraid to Be Known

If a deer doesn’t run away,

but walks toward you.

If you put your camera down

and your heart quiets enough

the sparrows in the stripped thickets

start to sing again.

If suddenly, every time you leave your house

you find antlers on the ground.

If you see a falcon strike a flicker from the sky

laying late in bed on a weekday morning, pick up

yellow feathers on the lawn to prove

you didn’t dream it.

If your dreams draw you on a night without wind

to the north tip of an island at sundown, where,

on a flat pond just a few steps from the restless ocean,

a swan glides through fire on water, ripples from its wake

rocking a skiff moored in the center like a cradle

that holds the sinking light for just those

few seconds we need to praise it, long,

full breaths, saying yes without words.

Then you are known by the great dream of the earth as one

who calms the ocean, laying down at the edge without fear

in the rising dark.

Walking at Dusk

Ghazal of the Waiting Field

All these years I’ve never walked the field next to my house

because there was a wall around it, missed three ponds in hollows

I couldn’t see from the road!

A family of ruddy ducks takes flight when they see me, 
leaving the shelter of their small pond

for exposed water?

The crunch of my boot heels in rocks is so loud

it hurts even my ears. Oysters dreaming in the shallows

tighten their shells.

Once a wave washed over the island, left me floating.

I should have called to the other dreamers in the water,

not waited until I woke up.

When Goethe said, “Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,”

he must have known how much it hurt to watch the gull

with beak bound in plastic try to eat garbage for hours.

Maybe it’s enough to discover where the deer sleep,

dreams pressed into the grass: a star turning with the earth

away from the sun, then toward.

Night without wind, take me back to an innocence

I may have never known. Let me sleep in grass

under winter stars.

Today, when I stepped over the wall into the field,

I didn’t know where to go. Too many paths

in every direction, low-lying thorns.

                               

Who ripples water when there’s no wind? I don’t know

who I asked, choosing a path just wide enough

for my feet to pass.

All these years I’ve never asked, never even wondered

when geese cried out, passing over land for the last time,

surrendered to the black ocean.

How could I have not known you?

Wing beats whistling on a night without wind.

Rocks, still, as water breaks around them.

My thanks to Robert Bly and Ghalib for helping me with the form of this poem, which is a ghazal.

Settlers' Rock

This is where it began. On a stone placed between a parking lot and a pile of rocks thrown toward the land by the Atlantic Ocean. There are names on a bronze plaque screwed into the rock, blue-green with patina, salt-scoured. Tiny, almost invisible insects dive bomb me as I stand before it, trying to read the names with my dim vision. I keep my mouth closed so I don't swallow one. They throw themselves at my face as if I'm a threat to their existence.


According to the plaque, these people were the first settlers on Block Island. They bought the land from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who had bought it from the Dutch I think, or maybe from a trader who was massacred by the Indians, I’m not sure, or if it really matters. The point is, before that there were no deeds of ownership and squabbles over property lines. All the names on the rock belong to men—righteously Biblical Simons and Samuels. Of course, there were men on the island before them--women and children, too. The indigenous people called themselves Manisees and were connected to the Narragansett tribe on the mainland. Within a hundred years most of them would be gone, wiped out by disease, slavery, and loss of spirit at the death of their culture. This was only 450 years ago. Not long at all when you compare it to the life of a stone, millions of years old. I still feel their presence when I walk the island. I don’t know if the sadness is mine or theirs. I wish I could ask them about the “great dreaming,” as the Gaelic seanchai called it, of this island--what the land itself dreams, passed down through stories over generations in a way that links humans to the hoop of life beyond ourselves.

We do have stories from the settlers. Someone wrote them down at one point, and now we tell each other, or tourists visiting the island, about what happened when to whom as best we know. As the story goes, these settlers listed on the rock, threw their cows overboard to see if they would make it to shore when they reached this northern tip of the island. They did, and their owners followed, hauling their possessions ashore. I’ve heard some people laugh at this story, but I don’t find any humor in it, just the cruelty of a people deluding themselves they had dominion over all creatures on earth in order to take what they wanted without consequences.

There is a dead gull, greasy and ragged in the rocks where I sit, next to Settlers' Rock. I lean around to get a look at the back side of The Rock. It is rough, uncarved. Invisible insects leap at my throat. I put my ear up to it and ask, silently, stone, tell me your story. I feel a pulse against my face, as if the ore inside the rock’s veins swelled like blood vessels, but I’m not sure it’s not the beating of my own heart.

Two old people get out of a white van, stiff-kneed, walk toward The Rock to read it. The man's eyes take me in then move quickly away. A pair of miniature glasses hangs around his belt loop. "These are the original settlers," he says to his wife. "Yup," she says. I want to hand them a magnifying glass so they could see the grains of the stone up close. His wife mutters "1661," gruff and ominous. I notice there is bird shit on the stone's back. I see wild, white streaks of paint, primitive graffiti, thank the vandal gulls,wonder if the town crew cleans the shit off the front for the tourists.

Finally, I see the expected cigarette butts, crammed between rocks close to the ocean. I wonder if they were all smoked by one person. A dozen at least, or if they blew into a crack after being discarded somewhere else. A patch of deflated sea purslane, succulent in summer, has caught the butts, starting to die now that the nights are cold, though the ocean keeps its heat much longer. I used to swim all the way through October, even at night, and some days in November. What happened to make me think the water is too cold?

A Jeep pulls up next to me, circles. Someone says hello to me, then drives away before I have to answer. I look toward the North Light and see the clouds have shifted to let the sun through. Gulls wheel around the tower and disappear on the far side of the dunes. The stories I've been told aren't enough for me anymore.

I want the earth's stories. What hums beneath the pavement and car motors. The old people have reappeared to my right, sitting together on a boulder. Her chin is in her hand, looking down at the ocean. He shifts and says something to her I can't hear. Their white hair glows in the gray light. If I am quiet enough, maybe I'll be able to hear them. Feet toward the ocean, rocks rumble as one as a wave breaks and fills spaces between the rocks I can’t see, shaking the ground, that I realize then, isn’t solid at all.