Eberly's Blog

Bonding with Nature: Part 6—New York City

2011-11-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

When I returned to New York from my summer travels, I went for a morning walk in Riverside Park along the Hudson River. As I walked along, I looked down and saw a round fat fluorescent yellow fuzzy caterpillar undulating her way south while I was striding north. We passed, me careful not to step on her, and her apparently oblivious to me and minding her own business, but we were both on the same path.

Bonding with Nature: Part 5—St. Louis—Domesticated Animals

2011-11-13T13:34:00.001-08:00

Dogs: In July, I took the dog tour of St. Louis, visiting my friends. I greatly enjoyed the company of a beautiful small black sweetheart of a standard poodle who rides skateboards and sits in my lap; a super-friendly golden retriever who loves to play ball; two rhodesian ridgebacks, one of whom jumped up and kissed me as I entered the house (or scratched above my lip, if you want to be literal); and a super-cute and beautiful and playful Tibetan terrier—my friends call her “a diva”—who jumps hurdles and plays on a see-saw and guards her territory with great attentiveness.

African Grey Parrot: I was out in the pool with my friends David and Alexandra and their daughter Scarlet. David had also brought out their African Grey parrot and placed him in his travelling cage close by the pool, so the whole family was there. We were talking about education, and David said, “You can find anything on the Internet these days.” An authoritative, commanding adult voice from outside the pool says, “Such as?”

Yes, it was the parrot, and apparently he does such things all the time.

He also dances to his favorite songs, and has a vast repertoire of tricks. At one point he was sitting on David’s right arm about a foot away from the cat David was petting with his right hand, all completely at ease with the situation and focused on the topic of conversation.

When I stood to leave at the front door, the bird called out cheerily from the other end of the house, “Good-bye!”

Bonding with Nature: Part 4—Missouri

2011-11-03T04:48:00.000-07:00

A Butterfly: I was almost run over by a butterfly walking the streets of St. Louis—a big black-and-yellow butterfly flew straight at my head. I ducked, and then thought, “What? Did I just dodge a butterfly?” And laughed. And watched it flit all around. Stay with me, I thought.

Another Rabbit: As I walked the same St. Louis neighborhood, I saw a little brown rabbit in the grass between the sidewalk and the street. He froze at the sight of me. I squatted down a few feet away, and since I didn’t have a cat to scare the rabbit, I decided to just wait, breathe deeply, relax, and let the rabbit know, I just intended to be good company. The rabbit loosened up, hopped around a little, came a bit closer, and we shared a little corner of the earth for a time. Then a car whizzed by and scared the rabbit off.

Damesflies, spiders, butterflies: On a lake in Missouri out at Innsbrook, I paddled a kayak one morning. A spider crawled up on the bow right on the center line; then a little closer to me, landed a damesfly on the same center line. A couple of butterflies flitted around on the sides. Escorts. The damesfly kept returning after the others left. In the morning light it looked jet black. It flew close and lit on the kayak where I could watch it closely. It was smaller than a dragonfly with 4 wings, but right on top of one another, not spread out like on a dragonfly, and with a shorter, smaller, stick-like body. Later that day, I was floating on the lake, lying on my back on a raft, and the damesfly came back. This time he was a shimmering, shining, midnight royal blue—my favorite color—the color of the sky at a particular time of night. He lit on my stomach, and I watched him for a long time. He flew off, and came back with his mate. One’s tail curled under, and the other mounted on top, latching on to the space between the head and the tail, with its own tail straight out. The one on bottom looked black, and now the one on top was black with 2 turquoise blue patches—one on the head and one on the thorax-area. They mated on top of my stomach for a long time; flew off; came back; off and on, all afternoon. They looked like Sanskrit when they were together.

Paddlefish: Meanwhile, on the same lake, kayaking the same morning, about 10 feet from my boat, a huge fish jumped straight up out of the water. It was about 4 feet tall and very thick with a huge paddle-shaped bill. It looked prehistoric. “What was that?” I paddled back as fast as I could. As I floated that afternoon, my only concern was whether that fish would jump up underneath me. It never did, but it did jump all around. There was more than one fish. All over the lake, huge fish with paddlebills would leap high in the air. I watched them all weekend, and asked a man who was kayaking by the shore what they were. He said they were paddlefish, and they were stocked in these lakes because they were bottom feeders and kept the lakes clean, and they were also sources for caviar. According to Wikipedia, the American Paddlefish is the Missouri State Aquatic Animal.

Bonding with Nature: Part 3—Colorado

2011-11-01T18:39:00.000-07:00

Flickers in Ft. Collins: My friends Pat and Michael have two flicker houses under the eaves of their house, and the flickers have babies. The flickers have lived there longer than they have—they came with the house. Every time we sat out on the deck to eat, we watched the flickers feed their babies, fly in and out of their home, and watch us. Parallel universes.

Big hummingbirds in the Southern Rockies: We visited another friend in the Southern Rockies, who lived high in the Ponderosa pines on rocky red dirt land overlooking valleys and mountains. The largest hummingbirds I’ve ever seen darted in and out of the pines and sipped at the feeders she hung all through the trees around her house. They took their time and moved slower than other hummingbirds. The air was thin and clean and fresh; time was leisurely; and we lived in another dimension.

Mountains and Molehills

2011-08-28T15:11:00.000-07:00

While I was waiting for Hurricane Irene to hit Manhattan, I was channel surfing and landed on Channel 1006—Free Movies on Demand. I chose Climate of Change, a 2010 documentary about people around the world fighting for a sustainable way of living. The stories ranged from Papua New Guinea, Togo, and India to West Virginia, where people whose families have lived in the Appalachian Mountains for generations are fighting to save their mountains from blatant, needless, and greedy destruction.

Known as "mountaintop removal," coal companies literally blow up mountains using tons of explosives, flattening the mountain and the landscape until it looks like a barren alien landscape from outer space. These companies--corporations, people--have already destroyed a land mass the size of Delaware, and they're continuing to blow up as many mountains as they can as fast as they can, destroying as they go the communities and lives of people and the other creatures who depend on the mountain ecosystems. The companies say flattening the mountains makes the land more usable (for tract houses, box stores, shopping malls, I suppose, as long as you don’t care if you can drink the water or breathe the air and you like living in an arid manmade desert) and that it’s the most economic way to extract the coal (employs a lot fewer people and they get a lot more coal a lot faster). It may do that, but it also unleashes tons of poisons into the air and water and land faster and in higher concentrations than we’ve witnessed before, and certainly more than we can handle, and it destroys the waterways and the homes and the beauty and rich life of mountains where families have lived for seven generations and more.

The people who live in the Appalachians are fighting this violence with all their lives, and many movies and websites have been and are being made.

Still, compare the mass media coverage of Irene with the coverage of the ongoing destruction of the Appalachian Mountains and its entire ecosystem. Almost everyone in the country now has heard of Irene, and the pictures of the destruction are played over endlessly.

Here I was sitting on a couch in my comfortable home, waiting for a storm that barely materialized, inundated by media coverage of said storm, and at the same time watching a little known documentary on an obscure cable channel that showed ongoing massive destruction on a much larger scale—more permanent, more devastating, by far—and completely preventable and unnecessary—made for and by man’s greed—and almost no one knows about it!

I am not minimizing the destruction that Irene did cause--my heart goes out to those who are suffering--but in terms of loss to life, community, and the environment, the damage is miniscule compared to what’s going on in the Appalachian Mountains. Boardwalks can be rebuilt. Power lines reattached. Homes rebuilt. Trees replanted. Lives, of course, cannot be replaced. Neither can communities. And neither can MOUNTAINS.

Where is the media coverage of this ongoing, completely preventable, manmade catastrophe?

Goodnight, Irene. Good morning, real world.

There are many sources online for more info. Here are a few:

Climate of Change http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1563712/

http://thelastmountainmovie.com/

http://www.ilovemountains.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining

http://earthjustice.org/features/campaigns/what-is-mountaintop-removal-mining

Bonding with Nature: Part 2—Montauk

2011-08-07T19:37:00.000-07:00

I was walking my friend Sadie’s beautiful grey Bengal cat Nigil on his leash in her Montauk neighborhood, when we saw 4 rabbits in a yard. Nigil stopped and twitched, all muscular attention. The rabbits froze. I watched. We all waited. Then, after about 5 minutes, it occurred to me that there was no reason to scare the rabbits, that I should just move Nigil along and let the rabbits continue their fun in the grass, so I did, and to my surprise, Nigil came along peacefully. There are always more rabbits. Besides, he had a surfboard to ride.

One afternoon, Sadie and I were walking along the beach in Montauk right at the edge of the water, when we saw something move between the rocks. “A sea worm,” Sadie said. It was a long rusty red worm creature with lots of little legs. I said maybe it was a millipede. We didn’t know what to call it; we just liked the way it moved—undulating and curling in and out of the rocks in the cool, shallow water. It moved with a rhythm all its own.

Bonding with Nature: Part 1—New York City

2011-08-06T10:13:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a lot of fun outside this summer, both in the city and travelling. Here is the first in my series of close encounters with other creatures:

I was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park in New York City, reading a novel, when a squirrel jumped on top of the bench about 3 feet away and started running straight at me; then stopped a few inches from me and stared; then ran off; did it again; ran off; did it again; ran off; did it again.

Several women caught my eye, and one said, "I guess he wants your attention." I agreed, and we all laughed, saying we’d never seen anything like it. It set the tone for the rest of the summer.

More Smells

2011-07-30T10:40:00.001-07:00

Montauk smells open, salty, and sweet—wild beach roses, wild grasses and shrubs, pine trees, sand, big skies, and vast ocean—with hints of sunscreen.

The Berkshires smell clean and earthy—dark moist rocky dirt, thick woods, ferns, pine trees, wildflowers, gravel roads, blue lakes—luscious, so rich and deep and sweet I want to lap it up and bathe in it.

Ft. Collins, Colorado, smells fresh and clear—sandy desert plains, scattered shelters of grass and trees, rushing rivers and rippling lakes—spacious, with lots of room for the imagination.

The southern Rockies southwest of Denver smell like red dirt and Ponderosa pines—rich and heady and spiritual—almost like the piney woods of East Texas where my mother’s family comes from—but thinner and more dispersed with more room to breathe and to distinguish individual scents.

St. Louis, Missouri, smells like brown dirt, grass, trees, and flowers—the meeting of the mighty Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the Gateway to the West—earthy, watery, grassy, flood plains and high rocky bluffs—rich and full like southern and eastern smells, but more spacious like northern and western smells.

On a hot, humid summer night, in the woods, in the dark, with no streetlights or flashlights, just moonlight, Innsbruck, Missouri, about an hour west of St. Louis, smells like cinnamon—like a rich, heady stew of sweet wet dirt and grass and trees and berries and flowers and honeysuckle and lake water and horses, spiked with cinnamon. Without the eye to distinguish the sights, the nose takes over as the organ of discrimination, taste, and joy.

Wild Roses

2011-06-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

New York smells neutral to me. Sure, there are garbage smells and gasoline and diesel smells and chemical smells and musty, moldy smells—even the occasional whiff of ocean air smells or Hudson River estuary smells, but they are all smeared over a backdrop of no smell. Most of the time, my nose can clearly differentiate the surface smell from the background smell. I know that whatever scent I happen to be smelling at the moment is only temporary, and underneath it all is nothing.

Louisiana is different. The air there is so rich, so dense, so sweet, so heady with rich, moist earth and flowering, fertile green and thick sea, swamp, creek, bayou, and river that my senses are overwhelmed. It’s a gumbo, a stew of so many flavors so thick that it becomes something completely its own creation. And the people who live there don’t even notice it.

I visited there in Spring, and as soon as I stepped out of the airport into the parking lot—even though I was surrounded by cars and still on ground covered by concrete—the air smelled sweet—completely, totally sweet—so sweet I could taste it—and I couldn’t smell anything else underneath it—no neutral undertone. I could smell the gasoline fumes and exhaust of cars on top of it, but the undertone was just sweet—sweet as far as the nose could smell.

I commented on the sweetness of the air over and over on my trip, and invariably every person who actually lived in Louisiana said something like, “Really? It does? I didn’t notice.” Or they just ignored me, which I charitably took as meaning the same thing.

When I returned to New York, I missed that sweetness. I couldn’t detect it anywhere. The nothingness was everywhere, with the overlay of pollution and occasional whiffs of ocean. A friend from Louisiana suggested I plant rosemary and carry some in my pocket. She sent me pressed flowers from Louisiana. It all helped, but where was that deep, overwhelming sweetness?

Then the other day, I went to my favorite park on the East Side, Stuyvesant Cove Park, and there it was. As I walked along the East River, smelling the river smells, the automobile exhaust smells off the FDR, whiffs of body odor and garbage smells from the assortment of humans travelling through the space, and even the pleasant smells of earth and trees and plants, a rich, deep, bright sweetness seized my nose and stayed and filled me—it was the only smell. Some brilliant souls had planted beach roses in the park, and they had grown into big overflowing bushes of bright fuschia-red flowers whose scent had the power to fill the air and follow me and even become the undertone of the park.

Thank you to the creators, builders, and maintainers of Stuyvesant Cove Park—and of all the other parks in New York and their many spots of sensual richness and delight.

The thing about New York is that there are always possibilities for such moments. And Louisiana—well, as my friend said about the gardenia she sent me, “A tad overwhelming, like a lot of Southern things, eh?”

I will be travelling this summer. Look for more reports on the smells of the world!

A Tribute to Phoebe Snow

2011-05-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

Phoebe Snow and I were born on the same date—July 17th—and her voice sang what my soul felt. She died April 26, 2011, and I have been listening to her music every day since, marvelling at the clarity, strength, beauty, and distinctiveness of her voice. Her songs were love songs, full of humor, passion, heartache, grace, devotion, loyalty, strength, and truth. Listening to her sing grounds me, confirms me, and gives me solace and comfort and joy. May she hear herself now the way all her fans hear her and feel the same deep recognition of a kindred spirit. Thank you, Phoebe. You are a shining star.
Listen here.

The Last Lions

2011-02-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw the movie "The Last Lions."

I hope everyone can see it. You can read about it, watch a trailer, and register for a sweepstakes to go to Botswana at this link.

Wild lions are being driven to extinction by humans, at an alarming rate. 50 years ago there were about 450,000 lions, and now there are about 20,000.

The 2 filmmakers lived out in the field for 2 years--just the 2 of them, no other crew, in order to minimize their footprint--and filmed 3 different story lines, until 1 emerged as the story to tell. It is an amazing story of one mother's struggle to survive when she is forced to leave her home because other lions are forced to leave their homes when humans settle in their territory. The shots they were able to get are incredible, but what's most impressive is the story itself.

If lions can learn to adapt to new environments and overcome their fears and instinctual programming, we can too. Let's share our home and help one another.

When life gives you lemon bags…

2010-04-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Ever since I saw a bird caught in plastic netting on a show, maybe Winged Migration, I have made a point of not buying any produce in bags made of plastic netting, unless I felt a compelling reason. On the rare occasions when I have bought something in them, I have meticulously cut the bags up into teeny tiny shreds—as instructed by something I read somewhere—in the hopes that no bird would get caught in them.

Today, I wanted lemons, and I went to Whole Foods. I could buy 9 organic lemons for $4—if I bought them in a yellow plastic netting bag. Or I could buy them loose for $1 a piece organic or half a dollar a piece non-organic. I bought the bag.

But when I got home and started cutting it up, I noticed the shreds still occasionally had holes that could trap a bird’s leg, and I was still putting plastic into the trash, and then from there, where would it go? Probably into that big toxic plastic continent brewing in the ocean—at least eventually—or in a landfill where it would create toxins for a thousand years or so, and it could do a lot of damage along the way.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the lemons in the first place—they weren’t local, and they weren’t sustainably packaged or transported, and I couldn’t really defend it. I like cooking and eating with lemons, but I don’t have to—there are other ways to eat and eat well. Still I had bought them, and here I was stuck with this bag.

What was I going to do with it? Save it for an art project? Maybe a collage of trash? How much stuff like that can I save?

A quick web search, and I found out they are absolutely not recyclable, but they are reusable. They make excellent scrubbers if you’re handy with a crochet needle. Not having a crochet needle or any idea how to use one, but having parsnips, carrots, and potatoes I just bought from the farmers’ market and was preparing for a veggie stew, I started scrubbing.

They do make excellent scrubbers—the best I’ve ever found, in fact, and much better than that nice wooden bristle one from Germany via Williams-Sonoma.

For more info on how to make scrubbers out of plastic netting—or to have someone else do it for you for free—check out http://fatbottombags.com/id15.html.

Yes, my little plastic lemon bag is nothing compared to the hundreds of miles of plastic wrapped around pallets of food shipped to grocery stores every day—and where does all of that go? I doubt they are recycling it or doing anything worthwhile with it—just use it once and throw it somewhere to poison us forever after—but at least mine isn’t choking a bird or literally a drop in the ocean, and now I have a good scrubber.

Gravel

2010-02-27T19:35:00.000-08:00

I am tired of hearing about how Washington, healthcare, etc. is stuck, tired of the same old obstructionist dinosaurs, tired of trouble and wheel spinning. Here is something different, to give us some perspective.

"Gravel"

When I was around 5 years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to be a geologist--or an anthropologist--but I thought I'd prefer being a geologist because they studied rocks and anthropologists had to touch bones. Whenever any adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I'd tell them the same. And I always got the same response: laughter, and "do you even know what a geologist is?" I did, and they had inadvertently given me the ground for my aspirations.

A little before my pronouncement First Baptist Church, Zachary, Lousiana, where my dad was pastor, had put a gravel parking lot across the street from the church in the yard between our house and the Lancasters’. From that time on, until they paved it when I was around 9 and we moved to a new house, I went out there almost every day with my Mason jars and sat in the gravel and collected fossils and pretty rocks. Our driveway right next to the parking lot was made of ground up seashells, and sometimes I wandered over there too. I studied the ground everywhere I’d go, and if a rock caught my eye, I’d plop down and start digging it out. It was hard to stop. All the rocks were so pretty, and one rock led to another rock. It was a vast field of possibilities.

I rolled round pebbles, worn smooth and shining in shades of black, white, gray, and brown, around and around in my hands, feeling the shape and the coolness of the stone. Over and over, I fingered ridges of miniature wave-like patterns in tiny pebbles. I brushed my fingers over the rough bumpy textures of snake scales imprinted on fragments of stones, as snakes slithered in my imagination. I delighted to touch tiny stones composed of layers like a cake, or the sides of exposed hillsides, wondering over each layer and what history lay within it.

As I held a tiny pebble in my hand and traced the snail’s markings, I felt the snail in the wet mud, and oh, to feel so small and vulnerable in the world, zinging through space on a small planet in the vast Milky Way galaxy in the endless universe, to be at the beginning, and then to die. What ancient river was the snail — Sara — crawling in, and what happened? Did she just stop and die of old age? Did she get stuck or lost? Did the world suddenly freeze, or a big flood come? Was her family nearby, and what happened to them? What was her life like before? How old was she? How long did she live? What exactly was she? And how were these rocks shaped? How did they come to be gravel?

Every rock told a story, spoke of eons of evolution and development, of ages long lost when dinosaurs ruled the earth and flying reptilian birds soared in the skies, when ape-like people with sloping foreheads and heavy brows made fire by rubbing sticks together and lived in caves and dug holes in the ground and wore furs. I could see them all—pictures from story books—and they came alive in my hands as I held the rocks, fingering them with great care and wonder and awe, loving the feel of ridges in the stone, the striations and variations of colors, exploring the evidence of snails and snakes and water creatures rubbing their tiny bodies in wet clay to die and being frozen there forever. I saw ancient ancestors learning how to make homes and tools and cook food—even discovering what food was—clothing themselves, feeling their way in the world when it was new and just forming and nothing was set in stone—no people in little houses in little towns going to churches and schools and driving around in steel cars to grocery stores and doctors and pharmacists. No dentists. No books—until they created them—and discovering writing and language and art—making it all up as they went along. The bones and the blood, the mud and the guts, filling my heart and my mind with the everlasting richness of life until I thought I would explode or die or myself turn into fossil on the spot.

Someone would come by—a teenager like Bonnie Guins or Gale Guice—and ask me what I was doing and laugh, “What are you doing that for?” If I was lucky they’d play ball with me—softball or football and eventually basketball when we got a goal. I’d take my little bat, hand-carved by my father when he was a little boy with his initials in it—and stand in the gravel parking lot, and Bonnie would throw me the ball right down our makeshift plate—a sweater or coat or book or something—and I’d whack the ball to my dad’s church across the street—over the street, over the parking spaces on the other side of the street, over the sidewalk, over the churchyard, all the way to the tall cedar trees lining the outside of the church—classic redbrick, white trim, steeple, all-American church—and that was a home run when I got it. If my Dad came out and saw me, or my Mom, they’d holler at me to stop that because I might break a window, but I never did, just almost did and felt the scare searing through me. The teenagers would bore of playing ball with me long before I did—I was like one of those dogs who wants you to throw the ball for hours.

Then I’d go back to sorting through fossils. I collected all the fossils and pretty rocks I liked in quart-sized mason jars, and lined them up on shelves in the garage. I would take them down sometimes and pour them out and fondle them, contemplating the lives they recorded, worlds unknown and faraway, but present right in my hands still. I couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t want to hold them and study them and why those girls who I admired so and who could play ball so well couldn’t see this treasure. How could people just park their cars over all of this and walk on it and see without seeing? Why didn't everyone want to be a geologist?

My friend Donna Harris, who lived way out in the country, miles down a gravel road, had even more rocks at her disposal than me, and they were bigger rocks. She got a rock tumbler one year for Christmas, and we’d gather up as many rocks as we could and polish them. I begged my parents for one of my own to no avail. They didn’t fully support my desires to be a geologist or an anthropologist, and now that I think of it were probably embarrassed that their eldest child spent hours and hours a day in full public view on Main Street of the small dairy town of Zachary, Louisiana, sitting in a gravel parking lot pouring over rocks, as if they were books. They were probably happy to ship me off to Donna’s in the country, where I wouldn’t be so visible to their peers and congregation and potential converts. But I didn’t know that. All I knew was that I wanted to polish rocks, so I learned to break them up with a hammer on the sidewalk in our front yard and polish them with clear fingernail polish. They didn’t look as lovely as the ones on the rock polishing machine’s box, but they did look better than plain old dusty rocks, and were fun to make, if a little tedious. The smell of the fingernail polish, though, wore old, and I went back to pondering and collecting and admiring the rocks as they were, au natural.

The sky was bright blue. Flying dinosaurs peered down at me, small and tiny in a sea of gravel. The moist Louisiana air smelled like fresh rain and low-lying muddy waters and sweet honeysuckle and jasmine and gardenias. Giant fish and squid swam through the marshes, as the snails and other creatures nestled down in the silt and mud. There was no time, and it was all time, and I sang in the time, spinning on the earth, flying through the universe, sitting in my place on the round ball of the earth, safe, no predators to pounce on me and eat me, only teenagers and parents to ridicule me, but I didn’t care, who could care when there was all this world to explore and such a rich history and so many rocks that I would never count them all, even in that small space. I could collect and collect to no end, and the whole universe and all of history was at my finger tips and under my small body and holding me up in time without end.

Cognitive Dissonance

2010-01-17T12:29:00.000-08:00

Conan O’Brien stands in a suit and tie clasping his hands and smiling as he jokes, and inches away, a person lies on a stretcher, injured and possibly dead from the earthquake in Haiti, surrounded by onlookers.

That’s the upper half of the front page in The New York Times on Wednesday, January 13, 2010.

In the two left-hand columns (traditionally the “second lead” spot, but twice as wide as usual) and running almost the length of the top half of the page, The Times ran the story of NBC’s treatment of Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno, “the battle of the late night titans.” To the right, under a three-column headline (major lead story), The Times covered the catastrophic earthquake.

A three-to-two ratio.

The picture of devastated people in Haiti was a lot bigger than the picture of the smiling Conan O’Brien, and Haiti was covered more extensively in the rest of the paper, and for the rest of the week, but still, really, come on—the fact is The Times initially devoted almost as much of its front page to the story of late night talk show hosts—two rich white guys fighting with their employers over contracts and schedules—as it did to the destruction of one of the poorest (and blackest) countries in the world by a natural disaster.

Maybe The Times editors were just as stumped and stunned by the news in Haiti as many others, and it took them awhile to see what they were seeing and to grasp the story. Over the rest of the week, the coverage shifted, giving much more attention to Haiti. By Sunday, the major lead was still Haiti—“Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises”—with a 4-column photo of a boy fleeing gunshots, and underneath it, with no photo, a 2-column story on NBC’s woes: “NBC’s Slide From TV’s Heights to Troubled Nightly Punch Line.”

Nevertheless, The Times reported on Saturday that much fewer people watched a TV special on Haiti than watched regularly scheduled TV show dramas like Bones. It also reports that eleven networks are planning a 24-hour marathon of Haiti coverage, instead of regular programming.

The point is not the coverage of Haiti, which is growing so extensive by the minute that in no time, it will turn us all off, but the juxtaposition of these images—so jarring and yet such a mirror of our world: Great privilege, ease, and business-as-usual side-by-side with great poverty and uncontrollable destruction. One is a world where we make choices and have options and have at least a semblance of control; the other is a world where things happen beyond our sense of control, where options seem limited or non-existent, and where there is only a scramble for survival. Taken together, side by side as they are in Wednesday’s Times, these stories provide a perfect picture of our culture’s state of consciousness—both our obliviousness and our caring, our ignorance and our knowledge, our shallowness and our depth, our sense of privilege and our sense of helplessness, our sense of entitlement and our sense of outrage, our determination to succeed and our determination to help those who are suffering.

About the coverage itself, we can explain it easily enough: we are distracting ourselves with entertainment stories; the media is pandering to the public (not only in entertainment coverage but also in its coverage of Haiti); and the media treats the problems of rich white men as so important and of poor people of color as so unimportant that even in the face of major disaster it still treats them almost equally. It’s easy to see how our habits of compartmentalization (entertainment-hard news, us-them, here-there, black-white, me-not me, the real and the unreal) make this type of coverage possible. Maybe we’re so used to such juxtapositions, we don’t even notice them, except in those rare moments such as this one, where they are extremely insensitive.

The O’Brien-Leno story is the type of story we can talk and think about without scratching the surface of life in any way whatsoever—a perfect vehicle for mind (or mindless) chatter. There’s nothing to really feel here, and we have the option of thinking and caring about it or not as we see fit. What happened in Haiti, though, is not something to think about, talk about—it’s requires us to FEEL and to DO something. We have no option but to address it in some deep way, and it hurts—a lot—to even witness what’s happening from afar, and the doing is complicated and messy and brings to the fore all the limits of the world we’ve created so far. That’s one reason people would rather watch their regular shows or follow the ups and downs of talk-show hosts. Still, even if we ignore the story, we know we’re ignoring it, and we feel our ignorance. Over time, media coverage of Haiti will probably turn it into a story that we can’t feel anymore, if we’re far enough removed from the land and the people, but even that loss of caring will at least nudge our consciences.

The earthquake in Haiti broke through the Hollywood-New York Times-life-as-usual-for-any-of-us bubble of unreality, like Katrina, 9-11, and other disasters. Would it were possible for us to wake up without such bloodshed and destruction. May we remain compassionate and alive to what matters most in life.

Bless all of the people who are in Haiti, all who are doing what they can, all who have left this world, and those who remain in it. May our eyes, minds, and hearts be open, and may we find balance.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-13T19:20:00.000-08:00

One man says to another man on the subway, “I think 2010 is going to be a good year,” and the other guy nods yes, “The thing about 2010 is going to be knowing which of all the opportunities out there will pay off.”

May sound banal, even clichéd, but when I heard it, I thought, “Yes, that is what it’s going to be about—making decisions and choices and knowing, not just going along, making hunches, but actually knowing.”

That was on January 2, 2010 (Number 1 train going south from 72nd Street, approaching Times Square, middle of the day), and so far it’s true to my experience.

May we all know which of our opportunities will pay off and enjoy this new year--Welcome 2010!

What I Am Grateful For Today

2009-12-28T20:09:00.000-08:00

Cats

Dogs

Birds

Little furry creatures

Deer and bobcats

Twigs

Trees

Snow, ice, slush, even dirty yucky piles of frozen snow and slush—cold, glorious cold, shimmering with light

Full moons, slivers of moons, new moons

People who read my blog

Words, without which there would be no blog, no books, no writing, no speaking—In the beginning was the word

Computers that work, without which there would be no blogs, no internet, no moveon.org, probably no Obama, definitely no email

Clean laundry, order in the home, everything in its place and a place for everything

Christmas cards, holiday greetings, holiday videos, holiday songs, Christmas trees, Christmas ornaments—carefully unwrapping them, taking them from the box, hanging them on the tree, remembering who gave them to me when, and telling the stories of the ornaments to loved ones now, and remembering, remembering all that love

Miakara singing “Ave Maria”—so clear and pure and fearless

My Grandma Cecil’s house and every Christmas I ever spent with her, her cooking, the lake outside her window, the fire in the fireplace, the smell of pines, the vast expanse of lawn and pine trees and lake stretching out beyond the cedar-framed panes of her windows, walls of windows looking out upon woods, deer and squirrels coming to feed at her backdoor, my grandpa putting firewood on the fire and playing with his grandkids, laughing and joking with us and telling us stories about how he dropped a crop-duster right down in a tiny field—I miss her

All of my grandparents, parents, brothers, and sisters, who have given me such a rich life

Stacks of student essays to grade—they were thinking and feeling and writing, some extraordinarily well, and they were willing to turn their work over to me to evaluate for a grade—amazing!

Bears—they teach us how to hibernate—the heavy bear goes with me, as the poet says—I feel the bear in me curling up for my long winter’s nap—how does that square with starting a new year? Oh yes, settling in for the long haul

Time off to dream, to sleep, to write, to play

A quiet, peaceful, light-filled place to write

The peace, peace, peace of my morning meditations

Friends, lovely, warm, and loving friends

Let us all laugh and play today and sleep deeply tonight!

Between Christmas and New Year’s

2009-12-27T19:24:00.000-08:00

The miraculous birth has happened, but the new year has not begun. We are in between, waiting for all to become clear. One friend of mine received news of cancer. He is waiting. Another friend reports that from her work with Body-Mind Centering, she is beginning to feel herself initiate movement from her center, her core, and let it radiate out to the periphery, instead of moving first from the periphery and dragging her core along. She is becoming connected and sensing the birth of a whole new way of being in the world. I am exhausted and a bit in shock at what is being born and seeking in all ways I can to hibernate, drawing everything in to conserve my energy for the new adventures I sense about to begin.

The minister on Christmas Day said our challenge is to settle in with the new life, the new birth, and to live, even knowing that this new life will too pass away, will pass through torture, dissolution, and death. To settle with the new and live. I like that.

Blessings to us all as we settle in for the new year and new life to come.

An Update on Hunting Wild Boar in Texas

2009-11-29T13:29:00.000-08:00

My sister who lives in Midland, Texas, called me after reading the previous post about wild boar to say that she personally knows many hunters in West Texas who love to hunt wild boar, that it’s their favorite animal to hunt, and that they do indeed eat the meat and also donate it to food banks. Whew! I am genuinely relieved and happy to hear it. That’s more like the Texas I know. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to ask her in the first place before I went off half-cocked based on a story I read in The Atlantic Monthly (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/texas-hog).

Talk about being detached from the source.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much we live in niches and how little we make the connections that would greatly increase understanding. For instance, the writer and his editors for the Atlantic article either had not read Pollan or had not made the connection between Pollan and the situation in Texas, nor had they talked to enough hunters in West Texas. (Or they simply chose to spin the story the way they did even knowing these factors.) To compound matters, I didn’t think to ask my Texas relatives what they knew about the situation. I just didn’t make the connection. It might also very well be that the sources for the Atlantic article haven’t connected with the hunters my sister knows either. It’s a big state, and maybe all these players don’t know one another. Maybe there are multiple stories, and it just depends on who you talk to.

Here’s to a more complete picture! May we all make the connections that increase understanding and knowledge. And next time, I will ask my sister before I make any sweeping statements about Texas.

Wild Boar

2009-11-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

My name means “courageous like a wild boar,” which is funny because right now I’m obsessed over the fact that Texas—the home of my birth—is overrun with wild boar. According to the November issue of The Atlantic Monthly (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911/texas-hog), Texas is experiencing a surge of wild boar in suburban neighborhoods, where they are decidedly out of place. But instead of mobilizing all those Texas hunters to hunt, kill, dress, and eat the wild boar, like one might expect from such a macho, gun-toting state as Texas, the state government is trying to figure out ways to poison and sterilize them. In other words, instead of seeing the boar as an inexpensive and handy food source, these officials are destroying them for no gain.

When will we ever learn that every problem is an opportunity? There are plenty of hungry people in Texas and plenty of wild boar and plenty of hunters. Let’s put them together.

I just finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, in which he concludes his investigation of our options in the American food system by preparing what he calls “the perfect meal,” whose main course is wild boar. He, a Jewish boy from New York with no hunting or gun experience whatsoever, learns to hunt wild boar successfully. He finds it a spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually uplifting experience that attunes him to the life cycles of nature and properly directs human aggression and killing instincts, while also allowing the boar to assert its nature and be a valuable part of the chain of life. He also finds the meat quite tasty. The whole experience of hunting, killing, dressing, cooking, and eating wild boar is the culmination of his exploration of the four basic options for obtaining food today: industrial food systems, industrial-organic mega-companies, small truly organic farms, and hunting and gathering our own food.

Meanwhile back in Texas, where the wild boar roam free, lots of financially strapped people are eating McDonalds or Whataburger and filling up on foods loaded with high fructose corn syrup. People in desperate need of real food and real nutrition, who are strapped for cash and probably bored out of their minds with “Dancing with the Stars” and Happy Meals, working mind-numbing, repetitive, cog-in-the-machine type jobs, don’t know there’s this whole other world of possibilities out there. Let’s train ‘em to hunt wild boar and process and prepare the meat, so they can eat. If it were only so simple…

Pollan says the hunter-gatherer model is no longer viable because we have too many people and too few resources, but here in this instance, we have the opposite situation: too many resources and too few people who know what to do with them, and no way to mobilize people to take advantage of the opportunity.

Why haven’t people in Texas figured out a solution that takes advantage of the abundant meat source themselves? Why are they struggling with manifestly over-the-top ideas like gunning hogs down from planes? What are they doing with the carcasses? Have we really become so detached from reality that we don’t even know a cheap and nutritious food source when we see one? Why would we throw away this opportunity?

The real obstacle here is one of detachment from the elemental nature of life. We drive cars to and fro, buying food in stores where it’s wrapped in plastic, with no consciousness of where our food came from or what it is and what it took to produce it and where we fit in the cycle of life.

Sitting here in New York City, writing this, I’m not about to go hunt wild boar myself, and it’s easy for me to criticize, but I’ve been to Texas and seen the freeways and suburbs stretching far and wide, so I know what the problem is, and I feel the conundrum, and it has woken up the wild boar in me. May we all wake up and smell the bacon. Teach us to know food when we see it, and stop overcomplicating life and take advantage of the bounty we are given.

Happy Thanksgiving, and welcome to the season of light!

Yes, it is about race

2009-09-23T14:21:00.000-07:00

I know I'm a little late to respond to the issue of whether Joe Wilson's uncivil outburst was motivated by racism in addition to belligerence, stupidity, hatred, and frustration, but still, come on, a white man, slouching in his seat and glaring at a black man and yelling at him and calling him a liar? Even if I weren't a white woman from the deep south who knows that everything in the south is about race and that it colors every issue and interaction between men and women and animals and people of any race in the south, I would know racism was at least partly responsible for his behavior.

What's really disingenuous is the way people deny it. But that's part of the southern way too--"Oh whatever do you mean child? I wasn't being hateful." Fluttering eyelashes, the whole southern belle thing. And southern men never admit a thing. Never admit you're wrong. Never tell the truth to a woman, or a black man, or anyone else, because the people who deserve to know the truth--other white men of your class and standing in the community--already know it. It's a code. Everyone knows it's a code. Bless Jimmy Carter for blowing the code and telling the truth.

Southern culture is based on lies. Lies that some people are better than others, that the color of skin determines how human someone is and their value, and that it is not only okay to enslave and mistreat people but actually somehow ordained by God. These lies have not been rooted out; they've just been covered over, avoided, and denied.

I received an email from a relative today--a fine Christian woman, as they say, perpetuating the lie that what Joe Wilson did was not motivated by racism. The title was "How to Tell If You're a Racist." It was being sent around from one white person to another as a joke about how blacks and liberals think everything is racist. White people from the south who think it's funny to joke about being a racist, sending it around like a virus on the Internet. How sick!

Where is the Christian outrage at the lack of civility? Why didn't the people perpetuating this email spend their energy healing the wounds of racism instead of denying that they still exist?

What most amazed me is that this completely unprovoked and unjustified attack on Obama received so much press when the really great thing about that speech happened minutes before:
Obama standing tall and calm stated simply about one of the persistent stories spread about healthcare: "It's a lie." He looked right at those Republicans who had been spreading the lies and spoke civilly to their faces and said, "It's a lie." He spoke the truth, and that's a beautiful thing. The president of our country at last speaking the truth. No more lies.

For a beautiful book about the relationship between white Southern Christianity and racism in this country and about the pervasive effects of racism on our whole culture, read Wendell Berry's The Hidden Wound.

And to make my own contribution to healing the past, here's a story from my past: "Playing with Big Bertha's Daughter."

“You go out in that yard and play with her this minute, or I’ll give you a spanking!”

The maid’s daughter. The black maid’s daughter. Big Bertha’s daughter. With her hair in pigtails. Me play with her on the Main Street of Zachary, Louisiana? I was acutely embarrassed. All the cool kids would see me and think I was friends with her, that I was playing with her by choice. They would make fun of me. They would look down on me. They wouldn’t talk to me, or invite me over to play with them. They would call me a “nigger lover” behind my back, the worst thing you could be in that town, other than poor white trash, and my mom made me play with them too. I was the preacher’s daughter. People looked up to us. I had to set an example. Play with the poor white kids, the poor black kids. Jesus loved the sick and the lame. We were all God’s children. But didn’t she know this would scar me for life? I would never be popular now, or cool. Boys wouldn’t like me. I wouldn’t get to go on dates, or go dancing, or wear cool clothes. And everyone would think I was holier than thou, a goody two shoes. My life was over, and I was just 6 years old. I didn’t know that in the past other white kids had played with the maid’s daughters, or the slave’s daughters, that it was part of the heritage of the south. That world didn’t exist anymore, and all I knew was that I’d never seen any white girls play with any black girls ever, and I had enough problems fitting in without this too.

I don’t remember her much at all. Just a little black girl with pig tails wearing hand-me-down clothes and terrified to speak. A blank, dark face, looking at me like, “What now?” She was just as scared of me, just as embarrassed. She didn’t want to be there either, playing on Main Street with her mother’s boss’s daughter, a privileged white kid. It was like she was on display. She wasn’t a charity case. She hated it too. She must’ve fought with her mother as much as I had.

What had possessed them? Maybe Bertha had to bring her to work that day, and my mom being the cheerful, helpful preacher’s wife, said, “No problem. Bring her. Eberly will play with her.” Probably visions of Gone with the Wind and the glorious southern past dancing around in the back of her mind somewhere, and on top of that an opportunity to show how Christian and unprejudiced she was.

That was a very big deal, then, in the mid 60s. They hadn’t integrated the schools, yet, but there was talk of it, and it would happen soon, in a few years, and the whole thing was to show others that white and black kids could play together, to not give in to the rampant racism of the town.

Why couldn’t we just play in the house, I wanted to know. Because Bertha was cleaning in the house, and why, Eberly, you know you like to play outside and why would you want to play in the house? That sweet sickly smile and voice. I know she knows, and she knows I know what the problem is, but she’s pretending she doesn’t. “My child, whatever do you mean?” That old Southern Belle schtick, pretending there’s no problem and that I’m not justified in my complaints at all, when she knows good and well that she would’ve reacted the same way.

A little sympathy would’ve gone a long way to helping me rise to the occasion, but I didn’t get it,
and I didn’t rise. I fell.

I think I was mean to her. She never came back. I’m sure I was mean to her. I’m sure I felt very guilty. I must’ve said something cruel, like, “I don’t want to play with you. I’m only here because my mom is making me.” She was probably mean to me too. “What makes you think I’d want to play with you anyway, you stupid white girl? I don’t need you.”

I disappointed my parents. My mother was angry at me. She looked at me with disgust. She was ashamed of me.

For years, I felt this heavy weight of guilt and sadness in my stomach, until it became an unconscious, persistent feeling of embarrassment and guilt, vulnerability.

I wish I could make it up to her now.

Big Bertha’s daughter, wherever you are, I am sorry. I am sorry that I didn’t make you feel welcome, that I wasn’t warm and generous, and that I didn’t treat you like a friend. I’m sorry I made you feel bad. I wish I could take it all back. I wish I had acted just like my mother wanted me to act. I wish I had acted like myself, as if I were happy to play with you and get to know you and I didn’t care who in the world saw me. I wish I had been proud to be with you because you are just as important and valuable as me. I wish I had been curious. I wish we had played happily and un-self-consciously in my front yard, and I had showed you all my treasures. I wish we had become friends. I wish I had discovered something new. I wish I had been confident, humble, and kind. I am sorry.

How are you now? I hope you know that you were better than I treated you, and that you didn’t deserve to be unwelcomed. I hope you feel your own worth, and you didn’t let some little piss-ant, stubborn, egotistical white kid get the best of you. But if you did, I hope you forgave yourself, and you don’t let it eat at your soul anymore. I hope you feel confident and strong, and that you are proud of your mother and compassionate in your understanding of her.

I am sorry.

Thank you, Barry!

2009-09-15T19:30:00.000-07:00

I've just set up my first blog, thanks to the support and encouragement of my friend Barry, whose own blog is an inspiring model. It's easier to get started than to put it on a list of things to do like I've been doing for the past few years.