The Solace of Open Spaces

“The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”

Gretel Erlich, THE SOLACE OF OPEN SPACES

Above is one of my favorite quotes by this couragous American writer and activist, Gretel Ehrlich. She has lived as a filmmaker in Los Angeles and a ranch hand in Wyoming, written about being struck by lightening and about herding sheep in the prairies, has travelled to Greenland to speak with the people who lived there, and went far into the Arctic to listen to the stories the land had to tell her as well. She is truly one whose art is her life.

 

"Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are."

Gretel Ehrlich joined the Cape Farewell Project on their first Art/Science Expedition in 2003, on a voyage from Tromsø to Spitsbergen via Bear Island. Cape Farewell is an international organization that support environmental art and exchange between scientists and artist to raise consciousness about global change. Gretel has published many works of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry including: The Solace of Open Spaces, This Cold Heaven and A Match to the Heart.*

She has visited Greenland ten times, resulting in a book, This Cold Heaven, a National Geographic story on the effect of climate change on traditional hunting culture in January, 2006, a National Public Radio report, and a forthcoming film. She is also the author of The Future of Ice, a non-fiction work on climate change the includes the first Cape Farewell voyage to the Arctic.

Gretel Ehrlich spent the year 2007 on a circumpolar journey meeting with Arctic people in villages across six Arctic nations, in order to hear about their lives - past and present - and how they are being affected by climate change. Her book, Farthest North, about indigenous Arctic people and climate change, is forthcoming from National Geographic Books in 2009. It explores the ways in which the changing climate has already affected their icecaps and landscapes, their lives and traditions. Arctic ecosystems are in a state of collapse and the remaining subsistence traditions of these boreal cultures are vanishing with them. To read a good interview with Robert Birnbaum about This Cold Heaven , follow the link.

"So much in American life has had a corrupting influence on our requirements for social order. We live in a culture that has lost its memory. Very little in the shapes and traditions of our grandparents pasts instructs us in how to live today, or tells us who we are, or what demands will be made on us as members of society. The shrill estrangement some of us feel in our twenties has been replaced by a hangdog collective blues. With our burgeoning careers and families,  we want to join up,  but it’s difficult to know how or where. The changing conditions of life are no longer assimilated back into a common watering trough. " (1997)

Finals Week..........

I'm in the middle of finals for my ESL certificate program, which has taken up pretty much 24/7 for the past month. So, dear friends and colleagues, forgive me if I've not been very conversant. I've been immersed in a fascinating world of international students and the roots of Language Acquisition, and a group of fellow explorers, many just out of college and eager to see the world, but many like me as well. Retired? Never! Just creating a new career, a new path, a new adventure. Increasingly, I realize that there are no finalities.

Just passages.

It has been wonderful to meet people from around the world.........and I've occasionally become teary-eyed sitting with young people from the Ivory Coast, and China, and Saudi Arabia, and Korea, and Brazil, and Ecuador, and Sumatra......all immersed in finding ways to communicate, to speak with each other. All needing each other to do so.
So wish me luck. Off I go to the library to do something I haven't done in a few decades. Cram for a test!

Navajo Weaving

"A Navajo rug may be a commodity for trade. It also may be the voice of the weaver’s prayers

 and dreams and a way of life more than a thousand years old."

A film I've unfortunately just became aware of, after having missed it at the Tucson Film Festival in April. Here's a review kindly forwarded to me, taken from the Film Festival site.

Weaving Worlds 

From: tricksterfilms  Weaving Worlds, Bennie Klain, USA, 2008 (57 min.)

The film presents a compelling and intimate portrayal of economic and cultural survival through the art of weaving in a global marketplace. The result is a poignant digital portrait of Navajo artisans and their unique, often controversial relationships with White Reservation traders.  

Intimate documentary photography shows weavers at home with their families, engaged in the various labors involved in producing a rug, as well as at the auctions where they watch their rugs being sold. Contemporary weavers of several generations recall their introduction to weaving and selling rugs, and archival footage and stills illustrate their recollections.

Bennie Klain is a director of documentaries and short fictions, and the founder of TricksterFilms, based in Austin, Texas. A fluent Navajo speaker, Klain often incorporates the language into his work. Weaving Worlds premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and was screened on national television by PBS. Weaving Worlds is a co-production of Trickster Films, LLC and the Independent Television Service (ITVS) in association with Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), with major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

CESL!

Well, I'm suddenly immersed in my month long certificate program at the Center for English as a Second Language at the University of Arizona, and I do mean "immersed". Suddenly, my days are scheduled with classes, lectures, observations, practicum, homework, readings, and of course the ever ubiquitous computer rooms. I go home, have a glass of wine, briefly escape into one of the familiar magical worlds of Ursula Leguin Earthsea or maybe the ever troubled landscapes of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover......and I'm out like a light.

I have to admit, I'm having a great time with it! The instructors are fantastic, my classmates, who range in age from early 20's to late 60's, are wonderful and interesting people all, and my mind is daily opening to new vistas of linguistics, language comprehension, teaching methodology, and other cultures, that I never imagined. Perhaps what I'm enjoying most is to sit in these classes observing these young people from all over the world talking, sharing, discussing. Weaving of worlds, weaving of understanding........lovely to see.

It's good to LEARN. In fact, it's a great joy to learn. Learning will keep you young. Guaranteed.

I'm going to give a presentation next week (PowerPoint) about SPIDER WOMAN at Dinnerware Gallery here in Tucson. Here's the info about the event:

Thursday, July 30, 2009
IGNITE Tucson -
5 minute presentations by Tucson Artists.
At The Screening Room, 127 E. Congress.

Postcards from Forever

THE DOLL'S STORY


This is a true story.

Towards the end of his life, Franz Kafka, who suffered from tuberculosis, took to walking in a park near his home. He became friendly with a little girl of about ten, and they often walked in the park together. One day, he found her crying.

When he asked her why, she told him she had lost her favorite doll. Kafka replied that she hadn't lost her doll - the doll had just gone on a journey, and was having adventures. And in the weeks that followed, whenever Kafka met his young friend, he would tell her all about her doll's travels, the places and people she was visiting. It became quite a travelogue.

Shortly before he died, Kafka bought her a new doll for the little girl. But when he gave the new doll to her, she became upset. "She doesn't look the same!" she cried. "Well," said Kafka, "that's because she's been traveling, and she's changed. People always change when they have adventures."

Many years later, when Kafka's friend was much older, she found the doll he had given her, packed away in a trunk. And she discovered a little note, hidden beneath her pinafore, that she had never noticed before. It said:

Everyone you love
will go away
and come back again
to love you in another way.


With thanks to Carl Hammerschlag, M.D.

Everyday Poetry: Old Photos

Florence at Griffith Park, 1928

Girl and Horse, 1928

by Margaret Atwood

You are younger than I am, you are
Someone I never knew,
you stand under a tree,
your face half-shadowed,
Holding the horse by its bridle.

Why do you smile? Can’t you
See the apple blossoms falling around
You, snow, sun, snow,
listen, the tree dries
and is being burnt, the wind

Is bending your body,
your face ripples like water
Where did you go?

But no, you stand there
exactly the same,
you can’t hear me,

forty years ago you were caught by light
And fixed in that secret place
where we live, where we believe
nothing can change, grow older.

(On the other side
of the picture, the instant
is over, the shadow
of the tree has moved.

You wave,

then turn and ride
out of sight through the vanished
orchard, still smiling
as though you do not notice)

Florence at 92

Everyday Poetry: Are we alone?

This was my beloved Grandmother Glen, who I only knew as an old woman. I like to think of her with her long red hair, riding her horse through the immensities of the Nebraska grasslands in August, endlessly dappled with native sunflowers and Black-Eyed Susans. When I visited her grave in 2005, I planted some perennial "Susans" there.

That trip to Dewitt, Nebraska is one of my favorite magical stories..........worth retelling here.


In 2005, I had a summer residency in Connecticut. Enroute, I stopped at a rest stop in New Mexico for a lunch bread. Sitting at a picnic table shaded from the hot sun, I saw something shiny on the ground, and investigating, found a pair of expensive looking, elaborate pliers. It seemed wasteful to just leave them there, so I threw them into the back of my car, and proceed with my long trip.

Somewhere around Missouri, I got the idea of taking a northerly detour and trying to find the grave of my grandmother. I knew that she had been buried in a small town called Dewitt in Nebraska. She died when we were overseas, and my father had flown out to bury her. I realized that no one had visited that grave in almost 40 years. I didn't even know if Dewitt still existed.

But Dewitt did still exist, not too far from Beatrice, and I found the graveyard, and was glad to finally see the landscape my grandmother had infused my childhood imagination with. After paying my respects I took a day to learn something about this little town of about 3,000 people. It turned out that if you weren't farming in Dewitt, you probably worked at the tool and die factory, which had been established in the 20's by a Swedish immigrant, and was famous for it's patented "Vice Grip".

You can probably see where this story is going. I drove on to Connecticut, unpacked my car when I arrived, and discovered the pliers I had completely forgotten about. In the side of the handle was the legend:

"Vice-Grip: The Original"