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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.
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
TRAVEL
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.
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
TRAVEL
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.
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
TRAVEL
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.”
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
TRAVEL
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.
FREE PALESTINE!
Short Trips
Venturing forth upon voyages and various viewings.
SHORT TRIPS
Women
Celebrating the power, beauty, wisdom, leadership of all women, and of “womanly” aspects. Okay, okay, maybe some regretable brutality too.
WOMEN
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.
INDIGENOUS MATTERS
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.
Poetry
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.
Poetry
