Living by the Word (16 page)

Everyone knows if we eat mainly grains and beans it is easily possible to feed everyone on the planet.

And there’s always the next ice age to consider.

I feel as if my very right to grow in new ways that protect and nurture the planet is being threatened by the government’s plan. How cruel, too, eventually to learn a better way of doing something and then be denied the use of it. It is like the reactionary laws our government sometimes enacts that take away freedoms from people—women, gays, people of color, children—that much of the rest of the population has learned to be glad they have, because they understand this ultimately means a richer, freer life for themselves. Freedom, after all, is like love: the more you give to others, the more you have.

Every small, positive change we can make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future. I am happy to say that, thanks to the persistence of my friends, I have changed about seaweed. From someone who hid behind the hostess when the fried wakame platter went by, I’ve become someone who doesn’t bother to take food to the beach. I can lie on the sand in the sun and eat the dried seaweed straight off the rocks.

1986

*
Sea Vegetable (gourmet) Cookbook and Forager’s Guide
by Eleanor and John Lewallen
(
Navarro, CA: The Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company, 1983).

[This was written to celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., and delivered as a keynote address at the University of California, Davis, January 15, 1983.]

…There are people who think that only people have emotions like pride, fear, and joy, but those who know will tell you all things are alive, perhaps not in the same way we are alive, but each in its own way, as should be, for we are not all the same. And though different from us in shape and life span, different in Time and Knowing, yet are trees alive. And rocks. And water. And all know emotion.

—Anne Cameron,
DAUGHTERS OF COPPER WOMAN*

Some years ago a friend and I walked out into the countryside to listen to what the Earth was saying, and to better hear our own thoughts. We had prepared ourselves to experience what in the old days would have been called a vision, and what today probably has no name that is not found somewhat amusing by many. Because there is no longer countryside that is not owned by someone, we stopped at the entrance to a large park, many miles distant from the city. By the time we had walked a hundred yards, I felt I could go no farther and lay myself down where I was, across the path in a grove of trees. For several hours I lay there, and other people entering the park had to walk around me. But I was hardly aware of them. I was in intense dialogue with the trees.

As I was lying there, really across their feet, I felt or “heard” with my feelings the distinct request from them that I remove myself. But these are not feet, I thought, peering at them closely, but roots. Roots do not tell you to go away. It was then that I looked up and around me into the “faces.” These “faces” were all middle-aged to old conifers, and they were all suffering from some kind of disease, the most obvious sign of which was a light green fungus, resembling moss and lichen, that nearly covered them, giving them—in spite of the bright spring sunlight—an eerie, fantastical aspect. Beneath this greenish envelopment, the limbs of the trees, the “arms,” were bent in hundreds of shapes in a profusion of deformity. Indeed, the trees reminded me of nothing so much as badly rheumatoid elderly people, as I began to realize how difficult, given their bent shapes, it would be for their limbs to move freely in the breeze. Clearly these were sick people, or trees; irritable, angry, and growing old in pain. And they did not want me lying on their gnarled and no doubt aching feet.

Looking again at their feet, or roots—which stuck up all over the ground and directly beneath my cheek—I saw that the ground from which they emerged was gray and dead-looking, as if it had been poisoned. Aha, I thought, this is obviously a place where chemicals were dumped. The soil has been poisoned, the trees afflicted, slowly dying, and they do not like it. I hastily communicated this deduction to the trees and asked that they understand it was not I who had done this. I just moved to this part of the country, I said. But they were not appeased. Get up. Go away, they replied. But I refused to move. Nor could I. I needed to make them agree to my innocence.

The summer before this encounter I lived in the northern hills of California, where much logging is done. Each day on the highway, as I went to buy groceries or to the river to swim, I saw the loggers’ trucks, like enormous hearses, carrying the battered bodies of the old sisters and brothers, as I thought of them, down to the lumberyards in the valley. In fact, this sight, in an otherwise peaceful setting, distressed me—as if I lived in a beautiful neighborhood that daily lost hundreds of its finest members, while I sat mournful but impotent beside the avenue that carried them away.

It was of this endless funeral procession that I thought as I lay across the feet of the sick old relatives whose “safe” existence in a public park (away from the logging trucks) had not kept them safe at all.

I
love
trees, I said.

Human,
please,
they replied.

But I do not cut you down in the prime of life. I do not haul your mutilated and stripped bodies shamelessly down the highway. It is the lumber companies, I said.

Just go away, said the trees.

All my life you have meant a lot to me, I said. I love your grace, your dignity, your serenity, your generosity…

Well, said the trees, before I actually finished this list, we find you without grace, without dignity, without serenity, and there is no generosity in you either—just ask any tree. You butcher us, you burn us, you grow us only to destroy us. Even when we grow ourselves, you kill us, or cut off our limbs. That we are alive and have feelings means nothing to you.

But I, as an individual, am innocent, I said. Though it did occur to me that I live in a wood house, I eat on a wood table, I sleep on a wood bed.

My uses of wood are modest, I said, and always tailored to my needs. I do not slash through whole forests, destroying hundreds of trees in the process of “harvesting” a few.

But finally, after much discourse, I understood what the trees were telling me: Being an individual doesn’t matter. Just as human beings perceive all trees as one (didn’t a U.S. official say recently that “when you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ’em all”?), all human beings, to the trees, are one. We are judged by our worst collective behavior, since it is so vast; not by our singular best. The Earth holds us responsible for our crimes against it, not as individuals, but as a species—this was the message of the trees. I found it to be a terrifying thought. For I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions—those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.

And how hard it will be to change our worst behavior!

Last spring I moved even deeper into the country, and went eagerly up the hill from my cabin to start a new garden. As I was patting the soil around the root of a new tomato plant, I awakened a small garden snake who lived in the tomato bed. Though panicked and not knowing at the time what kind of snake it was, I tried calmly to direct it out of the garden, now that I, a human being, had arrived to take possession of it. It went. The next day, however, because the tomato bed
was
its home, the snake came back. Once more I directed it away. The third time it came back, I called a friend—who thought I was badly frightened, from my nervous behavior—and he killed it. It looked very small and harmless, hanging from the end of his hoe.

Everything I was ever taught about snakes—that they are dangerous, frightful, repulsive, sinister—went into the murder of this snake person, who was only, after all, trying to remain in his or her home, perhaps the only home he or she had ever known. Even my ladylike “nervousness” in its presence was learned behavior. I knew at once that killing the snake was not the first act that should have occurred in my new garden, and I grieved that I had apparently learned nothing, as a human being, since the days of Adam and Eve.

Even on a practical level, killing this small, no doubt bewildered and disoriented creature made poor sense, because throughout the summer snakes just like it regularly visited the garden (and deer, by the way, ate all the tomatoes), so that it appeared to me that the little snake I killed was always with me. Occasionally a very large mama or papa snake wandered into the cabin yard, as if to let me know its child had been murdered, and it knew who was responsible for it.

These garden snakes, said my neighbors, are harmless; they eat mice and other pests that invade the garden. In this respect, they are even helpful to humans. And yet, I am still afraid of them, because that is how I was taught to be. Deep in the psyche of most of us there is this fear—and long ago, I do not doubt, in the psyche of ancient peoples, there was a similar fear of trees. And of course a fear of other human beings, for that is where all fear of natural things leads us: to fear of ourselves, fear of each other, and fear even of the spirit of the Universe, because out of fear we often greet its outrageousness with murder.

That fall, they say, the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wasichus.** I can remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I have heard that fire-boats came down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy. Sometimes they did not even take the tongues; they just killed and killed because they liked to do that. When we hunted bison, we killed only what we needed. And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.

—BLACK ELK SPEAKS***

In this way, the Wasichus starved the Indians into submission, and forced them to live on impoverished “reservations” in their own land. Like the little snake in my garden, many of the Indians returned again and again to their ancient homes and hunting grounds, only to be driven off with greater and greater brutality until they were broken or killed.

The Wasichus in Washington who ordered the slaughter of bison and Indian and those on the prairies who did the deed are frequently thought of, by some of us, as “fathers of our country,” along with the Indian killers and slave owners Washington and Jefferson and the like.

Yet what “father” would needlessly exterminate any of his children?

Are not the “fathers,” rather, those Native Americans, those “wild Indians” like Black Elk, who said, “It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is one Spirit”?

Indeed, America, the country, acts so badly, so much like a spoiled adolescent boy, because it has never acknowledged the “fathers” that existed before the “fathers” of its own creation. It has been led instead—in every period of its brief and troubled history—by someone who might be called Younger Brother (after the character in E. L. Doctorow’s novel
Ragtime,
set in turn-of-the-century America), who occasionally blunders into good and useful deeds, but on the whole never escapes from the white Victorian house of racist and sexist repression, puritanism, and greed.

The Wasichu speaks, in all his U.S. history books, of “opening up virgin lands.” Yet there were people living here, on “Turtle Island,” as the Indians called it, for thousands of years; but living so gently on the land that to Wasichu eyes it looked untouched. Yes, it was “still,” as they wrote over and over again, with lust, “virginal.” If it were a bride, the Wasichus would have permitted it to wear a white dress. For centuries on end Native Americans lived on the land, making love to it through worship and praise, without once raping or defiling it. The Wasichus—who might have chosen to imitate the Indians, but didn’t because to them the
Indians
were savages—have been raping and defiling it since the day they came. It is ironic to think that if the Indians who were here then “discovered” America as it is now, they would find little reason to want to stay. This is a fabulous
land,
not because it is a country, but because it is soaked in so many years of love. And though the Native Americans fought as much as any other people among themselves (much to their loss!), never did they fight against the earth, which they correctly perceived as their mother, or against their father, the sky, now thought of mainly as “outer space,” where primarily bigger and “better” wars have a projected future.

The Wasichus may be fathers of the country, but the Native Americans, the Indians, are the parents (“guardians,” as they’ve always said they are) of the land.**** And, in my opinion, as Earthling above all, we must get to know these parents “from our mother’s side” before it is too late. It has been proved that the land can exist without the country—and be better for it; it has not been proved (though some space enthusiasts appear to think so) that the country can exist without the land. And the land is being killed.

Sometimes when I teach, I try to help my students understand what it must feel like to be a slave. Not many of them can go to South Africa and ask the black people enslaved by the Wasichus there, or visit the migrant-labor camps kept hidden from their neighborhoods, so we talk about slavery as it existed in America, a little over a hundred years ago. One day I asked if any of them felt they had been treated “like dirt.” No; many of them felt they had been treated badly at some time in their lives (they were largely middle class and white) but no one felt he or she had been treated like dirt. Yet what pollution you breathe, I pointed out, which the atmosphere also breathes; what a vast number of poisons you eat with your food, which the Earth has eaten just before you. How unexpectedly many of you will fall ill and die from cancer because the very ground on which you build your homes will be carcinogenic. As the Earth is treated “like dirt”—its dignity demeaned by wanton dumpings of lethal materials all across its proud face and in its crystal seas—so are we all treated.