I’m not a very good nature tour guide. For one thing, I don’t know much about nature. For another, I walk very quickly; I have to keep reminding myself to slow down. Despite my shortcomings; however, two days before Halloween 2019, I take my English Composition class on a walk to a nearby greenspace, a short walk from our community college campus in Queens. Greenspace. It’s such a recent compound that Word autocorrects it into two.
Memories are translations. We gather much and miss more. I originally compiled this archive in spring of 2022 for a final project in a course on environmental histories and values. I did it mostly for myself. I wanted to attend to what I had picked up throughout the pandemic — people, places, poems, photographs. These fragments are re-memories of ecosystems and relational nests.
Today’s itinerary: visit Earth Room, where a layer of soil, two feet thick, has occupied a gallery in SoHo since 1977.
When we moved back to Michigan, we bought an old farmhouse on five acres. I was still married then, with three young daughters and soon two more. After we had settled in, I planted an apple orchard. The farmhouse was a white Greek Revival with four bedrooms and an old lilac out front. It stood on a barely perceptible rise […]
The days are short and cold, and it snowed last Sunday. The tree canopies, now brown, have thinned. The birds have begun migrating southwards — I hear their calls from my room, where I sip coffee — and people in puffy parkas rush to and fro along the sidewalks. Gray clouds float low in the sky. Although the December solstice […]
Ring in two by twos,Twinning from the same root. Count the yearsOh! The years —You can only see themWhen they’re sliced in two.Cut down, dismembered,See what they’ve been through: The summers, the winters,The hunters, the gatherers,To them: time is celluloseAnd the sound of water coming close. I see you. Your bark couldn’t save you.What you built over the agesWouldn’t hold; […]
People often avoid the elephant in the room, but it’s time we talk about the cow in the room. She is a ruminant, after all, and can no longer be ignored. Indeed, the room is getting increasingly crowded and stinky. Let’s ruminate together and use our cowmon sense, so we can replace ignorance and crisis with science and solutions. It’s […]
Blue eyes, sometimes grey and stormy Others clear as cloudless day. One moment safe Enveloped in translucent depths Next, the ice wall melts Glaciers crash below; an enormous splash Waves build A mountain face of swirling color, kaleidoscope of shimmering light Smothering Drowning Swallowing blue and salt and foam Choking Spewing Struggling to swim up Desperate for air Weak arms […]
Sure Thing It is that with which the wind blows And the snowflakes carry from the skies The mountains echo in their deep crevasses The sky possesses in her blue, graceful expanse The child has in her smile The earth in her soil The dog in my arms. It is that with which spreads the smell of rain The mist […]
I lived in a small community outside Wheeling, West Virginia for seven months in 2020. New Vrindaban – a spiritual community drawing on Vaisnava Hindu tradition, current population 100 people and 70 cows – was my refuge from COVID-19; a chance to turn inward, to connect with nature. And as a native New Yorker and certified East Coast Liberal, living […]
I’ve dropped my broom
One of my favorite photographs hangs in my bathroom. At its center is a wheelbarrow, with wooden handles, braces, and legs. The ten-spoke wheel is iron. Cow chips – dry dung – are stacked two feet high in the tray. They also litter the grassy landscape, which is over-exposed and unending. In black and white, each chip looks like a […]