Family, friends, nature, books, writing, a good pen and journal, freedom of thought, culture, and peaceful co-relations - these are the things that occupy my mind, my heart, my time...
When I was 18-21 I studied American Literature and Poetry at East Tennessee State University. Poems like Chicago, The People, Yes and others still reverberate in my memory for their raw American soulfulness.
PBS has aired a wonderful, insightful biography about his life and work and how each reflected American history. He created out of the clay of the common people and the earthiness of American landscapes poetry that has more dimensions than any I have encountered since.
For those of you who are Ann Patchett fans, I highly recommend her new book of published essays: The Story of a Happy Marriage. First, for writers she gives invaluable advice by showing readers her own path and the teachers along the way. The essays themselves are small masterworks from which writers can learn much about voice and economy of word. Some are just plain fun (Winnebago) and others heart warming (Rose, a love story about Ann and her dog).
The Ann Patchett universe – the writer and her works – is new to me although I have read State of Wonder and The Patron Saint of Liars. Perhaps the way to know her best is to read This is the Story of a Happy Marriage because it describes many important times and relationships in her life as a person, friend and writer. The second way to know Ann is to visit Parnassus Books in Nashville. The quality of books, the gestalt of the place with all its fans, friends, staff, and occasionally Ann, speaks volumes about what is important to Ann.
Last summer I spent my birthday in Parnassus, loading up on Patchett books and other authors. The store is in a shopping district so be sure to take your GPS or cell phone to find it. Afterward I went downtown town to the Vanderbilt neighborhood and found a lovely restaurant, and later found a gelato shop where I enjoyed a double scoop of Pistachio to celebrate my 68th year on this fine planet. Writers like Ann Patchett make your Earth Walk a soulful journey. Try her new book of essays!
P.S. I highly recommend the audio book read by the author. Well done.
The National Science Foundation announced a current research initiative to study the West Pacific ocean’s “chimney.” This article describes how heating in the ocean interplays with atmosphere to cause havoc in weather and climate. Its known as the global chimney:
Next week, scientists will head to the region to better understand its influence on the atmosphere–including how that influence may change in coming decades if storms over the Pacific become more powerful with rising global temperatures.
The Department of Labor Secretary addressed the importance to extending long term unemployment benefits at this point in the recovery of the national economy. Read below:
What’s New
Reaffirming the Importance of Long-Term Unemployment Benefits
In a Dec. 24 interview with the BaltimoreSun, and on a conference call three days later with two-dozen reporters from across the country, Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez said “it would be literally unprecedented” if Congress fails to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program that provides benefits to long-term jobless Americans. Perez said that Congress approved the program with broad bipartisan support in 2008, when the U.S. unemployment rate was 5.6 percent. The current unemployment rate is 7 percent. He added, “The hole that this Administration inherited in the Great Recession was a deep one. And when you’re in a hole, you stop digging. We must maintain these emergency benefits in order to continue climbing our way back to a fully healthy economy.” Perez also noted that when Congress reconvenes on Jan. 6, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will bring up legislation to extend unemployment insurance and move it toward a vote. “Congress can do the right thing in the new year and renew this program,” said Perez. “It will help people who want to be employed. It will help families keep going. It will help create economic growth for the nation.”
Llewellyn Vaughan -Lee addresses a workshop audience about Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth – a new book in which he invited contemporary thinkers and writers who affirm a lost legacy of a once Earth-aware culture. Vaughan-Lee describes how we lost a great heritage at the end of the Roman Empire, when the last of “pagan” rites and sites were banned and destroyed. He asserts that we have been taught the wrong story – that the wholeness of the world must be recovered by dispelling the belief that we are separate from the “environment” by reaffirming we are inter-beings with it.
This is a very rich sharing during which the author reads from many of the world’s most articulate spiritual, ecological, and humanities leaders. Take time to listen in a quiet space.
Our present ecological crisis is undeniably the greatest man-made disaster this planet has ever faced—its accelerating climate change, species depletion, pollution and acidification of the oceans. A central but rarely addressed aspect of this crisis is our forgetfulness of the sacred nature of creation, and how this affects our relationship to the environment.
Only when we remember what is sacred can we bring true understanding to our present predicament. This talk will explore this most pressing need of our time: how we are facing not just a physical ecological crisis but also a spiritual crisis, one that demands a spiritual response from each of us.
We often overlook a key indicator of our cultural values about Nature: how we treat each other. Wangari Maathai’s recognition of this came clearly to her when she battled a male-dominated governmental and societal structure in her home country of Kenya. Wangari had earned a doctoral degree in ecology and became the first woman elected to a high governmental office. At the time in Kenya, women were considered the property of men with few rights and often subjugated by violence and sexual abuse. At the same time the government had assaulted the landscape for resources, denuding the land of its aboriginal forests. WIthout trees, streams dried up and drought ravaged once fertile areas where women grew food for their families. Hunger became a big problem among common people. Wangari began a movement among women, The Green Belt Movement, in which women were taught how to raise tree seedlings and plant them. In return they received a small payment, enough to help them develop some economic freedom and personal empowerment.*Kinking an environmental problem and social problems through an economic incentive turned out to be a brilliant strategy for which she earned the Nobel Peace Prize. The Green Belt Movement has reestablished forests, recovered streams, and improved food security. Women are empowered to take restorative action. From the Green Belt Website:
“Shortly after beginning this work, Professor Maathai saw that behind the everyday hardships of the poor—environmental degradation, deforestation, and food insecurity—were deeper issues of disempowerment, disenfranchisement, and a loss of the traditional values that had previously enabled communities to protect their environment, work together for mutual benefit, and to do both selflessly and honestly.”
During the American feminist movement, Susan Griffin published Woman and Nature (Sierra Club Books, 1978). She provided the basis for women and environmental leaders to understand the relationship between the subjugation of women by Western political culture and the subjugation of land for resource use.
Over the last fifty years, many thinkers, activists and writers have drawn similar relationships that illuminate an important truth: the way we treat each other is the way we treat wildlife, land, and nature as a whole. Aldo Leopold, in his development of The Land Ethic (Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, 1949, 1987) describes the evolution of an ecological conscience when culture extends rights from humans to the rights of animals and plants, to land, water and air – when humans are seen as one part of a whole of interdependent parts.
While advances in human rights have been achieved in the U.S. and around the world, there is still much work to be done. Locally in Pensacola we have arrested development in multicultural equanimity. None the less there are many people here who embrace the complexity of the relationship between human society and living communities we call nature.
For a an excellent example of this relationship, read Paul Giorno’s The Man Who Planted Trees. It is a wonderful short story illustrative of how people are linked to land and to each other, not in theory, but viscerally.
Listen to scholars, including Baird Callicott, Environmental Ethicist, author and Professor of Philosophy at University of Wisconsin. Susan Flader, Leopold scholar, introduces Callicott and describes how she became a Leopold scholar. Flader and Callicott co-edited The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold (1991 University of Wisconsin Press). Callicott has a new book about to be released: Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and The Earth Ethic which addresses global climate change in light of values-ethics.
On Veteran’s Day my family’s thoughts turn to the man in our family who served so well in the Pacific theater as a B-29 Pilot. His crew stuck with him through low altitude bombing over Tokyo and Saipan. There are many tales that abound from all the crew members, all passed on save one. Dad took his final flight over the Great Divide last December on Pearl Harbor Day.
It was not until I read Laura Hillenbrand‘s great book about Louie Zamberini, that I understood my Dad, his crew, and the Army Air Corps were the liberators of over 130,000 prisoners of war in Japan. I knew about the POWs but what I never comprehended, until I read Unbroken, was the brutality and suffering in those camps. When she described accounts of the POWs on spotting the brand new weapon of the U.S. – the Super Fortress (B-29) -and the distant flames from Tokyo – I felt such pride about my Dad and his crew members, whose daughters are our friends to this very day.
Dad lived a long life after WWII but it defined his life thereafter. Today I feel pride in my heart for Dad, his crew, my former husband Tom Williams, a Viet Nam War veteran pilot; for all the men and women today who go forth under difficult circumstances, whose families sacrifice as ours did (Dad reentered the Air Force after it formed post war and served for 22 years).
From my beloved father I learned about a time when most Americans had very little wealth or personal power. When the war ushered millions of men and women from a life of poverty into an incredible surge of economic power and upward mobility for average Americans, the creation of the Middle Class.
I grew up in that era when the “sky’s the limit.” We live now in a new time altogether where even the poorest person has a high standard of living. Dad and his family had no social security, insurance, scholarships, etc. That all came after the war. We sought to do good things for everyone in that era of trust and positivism.
The year my father was born was 1917. That year President Wilson declared war on Germany, ushering in WWI. The suffragettes began a two-year vigil at the gates of the White House, were jailed, beaten and force fed when they went on a hunger strike for the right to vote. The Silent March, led by E.B. DuBois, took place in NYC to make President Wilson live up to his promises to African Americans. The Russians declared a Republic and Leon Trotsky and Stalin battled over the implementation. Seeds of discontent, triumph and defeat were laid down in that year when the first born baby of the Edgar and Hattie Mae Feathers clan saw the day of light.
How will our individual and collective actions lay down the seeds of the reality our next generations will experience? Are we up to the challenge? I like to think we are.
Susan Feathers 