earthly voyages

Archives

now browsing by author

 

05 – Minneapolis

I travel to Minneapolis, mostly to see if I can reconnect a broken friendship. And it seems we do. I visit Louise Ehrlich’s bookshop, mostly an art gallery filled with books about Indigenous Americans. We are NOT a nation of immigrants. On the morning of my departure I attend an Indigenous Peoples’ Day sunrise ceremony.

03 – Akwesasne

The Red Path awaits its visitors in silence, welcoming those who tread upon it. The visit to the Mohawk Cultural Center is both ordinary and amazing. There is that absolutely incredible emblematic Wolf Belt that depicts a treaty between the French and the Mohawks. The seven purple lines signify the seven nations, white the peace paths guarded at each end by sachems of the Wolf clan, symbolized by the purple animal figures. 

01 – Grandmother’s Sendoff

“The first night I was ever completely alone in the forest I was already a grandmother. Later that night the heavens opened and the earth and the rooted ones drank the waters and I stepped out of my tent into the rain and mud barefooted and did my spinning jiggle dance. May that which I felt in those moments be with you in mind and in spirit on your travels among the living and the dead. May you be as one on your way with our blessing. Walk in beauty.” Author unknown.

02 – We begin…

I depart on my next voyage September 30, 2023, my mother’s 110th birthday. My plans are to go to a powwow on the land of the Massachusett people that day, and then proceed to the land of the Western Abenaki in Vermont, where I will visit friends and memories. Next Akwesasne, Minneapolis, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, the Black Hills, Calgary, Banff, Vancouver, Orcas Island, Bainbridge, Seattle, Portland, Petrolia, San Francisco. I must get to Calgary by 20 October where I will rendezvous with my good friend Joy. I plan to be in SF by 11/10.  “Where before we locked the gates, help us now to keep them open.”

Free Palestine!


True peace is not merely the absence of tension. True peace demands the presence of justice.”
M. L. King

I find that this piece entitled “I will not look away” – with words which have been thoughtfully composed by Caitlin Johnstone and Tim Foley – is particularly powerful and inspiring. It is a brilliant piece of spoken word, which is delivered over an accompanying backdrop of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata which serves to further drive home the melancholy feeling for the tragic subject matter.

Short Trips

Venturing forth upon voyages and various viewings.

Viewpoints from my voyages…

Women

Celebrating the power, beauty, wisdom, leadership of all women, and of “womanly” aspects. Okay, okay, maybe some regretable brutality too.

WOMEN

    The wondrous world of womanhood! Sculpture by Bari Ramoy, Santa Barbara, CA, circa 1990’s.

    Mythologies – BHARTI KHER

    Indigenous Matters

    I work at honoring and protecting indigenous cultures worldwide, particularly in North America, a.k.a. Turtle Island,` and particularly in Massachusetts, named for the Massachusett People, one of the indigenous nations that occupied the current state that bears its name. As the child of immigrants and invaders now living on the unceded land of the Nauset Tribe of the Wampanoag Nation on Cape Cod, I wish to walk the talk and not just talk the talk of reparations, restoration of rights, and preservation of culture, knowledge, and belief.

    Beach Plum Jam

    The beach plums

    Enjoy the dunes

    High winds

    Blowing sands

    Salt

    The company of poison ivy

    And everyone who uses them

    Native American

    Pilgrim

    Cape Codder

    Tourist.

    The plums flourish on lands

    First purchased from sachems

    Who never owned them –

    Not a tree or a dune –

    For four coats

    Three axes

    A day’s plowing with a team of oxen.

    Land that has seen grazing

    And whaling

    Fishing and fencing

    Bogs and berries.

    Land that remembers the Wampanoag

    Here for but three thousand years

    As do we who fill our pails

    Boil the plums

    Separate seed from fruit

    Squeeze the beach plum flesh

    Extract its essence

    As we squeeze each other

    The sweet juices we cook

    In anaerobic jars

    To make the jam

    To smell the sweetness

    The sweat

    The sour

    The desirable

    To lick our fingers

    And in memory

    To preserve it all.

    Throwing Away

    In further preparation for my grand exit
    I dispose of material things
    That once had value to me
    And still do
    A seventy-year-old
    4 x 7 weathered fake-leather
    Zippered autograph book
    From public school 95
    In the Bronx
    An archeological time capsule
    From the first half
    Of the last century
    Having survived wars, moves, and fires
    Filled with empty limerick poems
    from prepubescent classmates
    comprised of red rose and blue violet couplets
    And the hearty toast from my eighth grade English teacher,
    Who like my mother thought
    I had the potential to better conjugate verbs if only I paid attention.

    I dispose now of high school trivia:
    A senior pin.
    The 1958 yearbook.
    It is inconceivable anyone might care about this detritus
    Rather it is in the mind
    Where anything of substance remains
    and there is no need to throw any of that away
    As if one could.
    I wrote my first poem
    On assignment in freshman English
    And I know the words to that poem verbatim
    Sixty-eight years later
    Worth exactly nothing o’er these decades
    Except to me.
    That I now throw into the fire.