Are We Merely Visiting?

I am in the midst of this undeniable privilege: traveling to explore other places and communities in this world. For a week of rest and relaxation and learning, Judith and I chose an island further down east from our home in Deer Isle, ME, and journeyed to Prince Edward Island.

PEI is an island community home to approximately 135,000 souls and, like Deer Isle, hosts a robust fishing community -- although theirs is both more regulated AND more supported by the Canadian government, making Canadian lobster the primary competitor to our Maine crustracean. Additionally, there appears to be a somewhat robust bluefin tuna fishery here at this time of year, complementing the potato harvest. The red soil and long beaches make this a beautiful place, and we pass by field after field of potatoes newly harvested and awaiting the wheat, oats, and barley that will come next. The potatoes love the red, iron-rich soil and Irish Cobblers and other potato varieties are much beloved. With the decidedly Celtic lilt in the people's voices, it is easy to imagine a time when no ocean divided Ireland, Scotland, and Canada's Maritime Provinces.

Yet all over, too, we see how the economic consolidation of agriculture -- where once a 75-acre farm could support a family, now potatoes are grown on 1600-acre farms, just as in the U.S. midwest -- is creating gaps and shifts in the traditional island ways. Potato fields are given over everywhere to tourist cottages and second homes. And the Canadian government, either sensing or responding to these shifts or both, is a huge supporter of cultural tourism; which on PEI means Anne of Green Gables.

The beloved book by the native PEI author has an entire tourism trail named for its various locations, complete with actors dressed as Anne and a huge visitor center hosting bus loads of international tourists at the House of Green Gables. It's quite astounding.

As we drive, however, it is difficult not to wonder: are we merely visiting this earth, or living on it? As we have allowed our economies to develop uncontrolled, they at times appear to be eating us up rather than serving us. The truth is, the way native peoples once lived sustainably on our shores for thousands of years was never the colonial plan. British colonists in particular were in service to an empire on which "the sun never set" and from the time they set foot on these shores created economies that were about exports: exporting livestock (and enslaved peoples) and timber to the British colonies, in the West Indies or England; importing the rum and sugar and other goods they then needed to survive on their own. Colonization is about acquisition and consumption and the white narrative of North America is defined by this.

The House of Green Gables.

The question now remains for us to face and future generations to experience: now that we've eaten it all up, exported most of it and destroyed the rest (the deforestation of this island and much of the Maritimes is, as in parts of New England, a sad sight to behold) -- do we re-learn how to sustain our human (not just individual) selves and this world? Or will we be content to be merely visitors to this beautiful planet? And if the latter: how temporary will we make our visitation? how much of a foot print will we leave, how quickly will we consume what remains? Will we leave sustainable places to live for the generations of humans who could follow?

Falling in Love with Lubec: Vacation Fall 2019 Day #1

 “My worst day on the water is better than your best day in a cubicle somewhere.” - Ralph DeWitt, pilot boat captain, Eastport Harbor as quoted in Galen Koch’s project, The First Coast

Vacation Day #1. We make the drive down east along Maine’s Bold Coast. Completely rugged, wild, and poor. Destination: Lubec, Maine’s easternmost village from which the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Bridge arcs gracefully across the narrows to Canada.

Lubec is our first stop to see Galen Koch’s The First Coast exhibit and sound walk. Galen has been traveling in her renovated Airstream mobile digital studio along Maine’s coast to capture some of the voices of these hard-working remote communities in which people are struggling to maintain their traditional, sustenance-based ways of living: fishing, clamming, harvesting. She’s done a terrific job capturing these actual voices. Listening to them, seeing the accompanying photos by Greta Rhybus, and then exploring Lubec with Galen’s sound walk is a magical afternoon.

 Judith and I immediately fall in love with Lubec. It’s experiencing a bit of a renaissance since we first came through, 10 or more years ago, en route to Campobello. During that visit it seemed all the wooden, Gothic-style former smokehouses and canneries were collapsing into the water, where two large salmon farm pens lurked like sharks’ mouths waiting to swallow up the native fish. I can’t remember seeing a person on the street during that visit. Today there are people of all ages walking, the restaurants are full!

There is something magical about these end of the world places. You can feel how it could again be just you, the water, the land. Not about jobs, or going other places; not about cars or money. Just about being a part of this glorious planet.

There is an old church here for sale. It makes our eyes gleam with dreams. It’s in worst shape than the Stonington Opera House even was when we first stumbled upon it. But we can see what it might be. A new kind of community and cultural center, one centered in relationship to Maine’s indigenous communities and crossing borders of all kind. Small and simple, an end-of-the-world outpost where our stories can be told, shaped, imagined, reflected, re-told, archived in authentic ways. Another place where we can gather in community to learn.

A place of staying put. A place for introverts and artists. A place of growing and gathering berries. A tough place, too, where the huge fierce tides and the harshness of the climate compete for human lives. 

What is Avalon to Us?

Performance photo courtesy Opera House Arts.

Ah, Avalon. The magical Isle of Apples. Where King Arthur goes to heal, and from the mists of which he will come again. Sounds heavenly, no? Imagine the sweet crisp smell that is apple in salty, misty air.

The problem for us moderns, in this 50th anniversary year of Woodstock, is that we've yet to get ourselves back to this garden. When patriarchy crushed matriarchy, Christianity crushed the Druids, and life became about nothing so much as conquering and consuming to show who was right and called by God we lost an awful lot.

The newly commissioned, world-premiere, site specific performance "Avalon," written by Melody Bates in collaboration with the work of sculptor Peter Beerits at his unique sculpture park, Nervous Nellie's Jams and Jellies, and produced and presented by Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House, wants to remind us of what we have lost--and to what we still might get back.

Beltane: the celebration of the beginning of summer, when the cattle were driven to field, great fires were lit, and our ancestors danced around the May pole. This evolved into the Christian feast day of Pentacost, marked by the tongues of those same great fires signaling the arrival of the Holy Spirit in the apostles after Christ's death.

There's no question that something holy becomes visible to us as life is reborn in the blooming of the spring fields.

Our shadow selves -- Mordred in legend and play, he who is ultimately responsible for killing the King Stag, Arthur -- are very visible in "Avalon." How easy to indulge the adolescent, narcissistic shadow, how difficult to keep it at bay. Yet at the end of this play, it is Mordred whose speech holds the biggest moment of truth for attendees: it is not he, he points out, (or Trump) who is responsible for the blood tide of war in which we live. Our choices -- each and every one, small as well as large -- make the tide. Giving more life to Mordred, our shadow selves, is a part of our collective will -- or lack thereof. And Mordred (played smartly by Shawn Fagan) is real, and therefore loveable, as well.

Neither the wizards nor the Druids (nor later, the native Americans) knew how to defeat the bloody tide of the Anglo-Saxons. Their relentless, irregular warfare -- their ability to commit genocide and still consider themselves Christians, in combination with their hatred of women -- drove civilizations and their peoples into the ground from which we have yet to emerge. We are stuck in a blasphemy of unholy leaders: men who, like their slave-holding kin before them, will let no life go unscarred, no lie be untold, in their quest for power and personal gain. The sad, lost culture in which we try to honor each other and the earth is one of taking rather than giving.

We need, collectively, to dream a better dream -- and wake to join the dance that brings it to life.

"Avalon" points the way. And for those of you who simply want to be a child again, and play in the magical woods: come wander.

Avalon
an Opera House Arts at the Stonington Opera House world-premiere production
every evening at 5:30 p.m., now through August 25
Nervous Nellies Jams & Jellies
Sunshine Road
Deer Isle, ME

Making Different Choices

The Taunton River in southeastern Massachusetts.

The picture of the Taunton (pronounced Ton-Ton by the native tribes of this area) River to the right is familiar to any of us who grew up in southeastern New England: a gently tidal, brackish waterway lined by salt marshes and once teeming with fish and life -- and now subject to marinas and both the intentional (dumping) and unintentional (boats, roads, etc.) pollution that is the hallmark of white settler colonialist development in the 21st century.

The Taunton River was one of the most sacred to the Wampanoag people, who resided here for thousands of years prior to the unchecked immigration of British Calvinists, a.k.a. Puritans, who assumed rights to what they called the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Lisa Brooks' new history of what we know of as King Philip's War, "Our Beloved Kin," gives us -- based on a careful reading of historical documents, primarily land deeds, as well as a knowledge of Wampanoag language (part of the Algonquian language family) -- a new, more balanced perspective on the white European immigration to this continent and in particular to this place.

Growing up in southeastern CT, the only histories we were provided were those told by the white settler colonists themselves -- Miles Standish, John Winthrop ("The City on a Hill"), and the various victors of numerous native extermination campaigns. One of the most notable of these, which I knew nothing about as a middle and high school student in Mystic/Stonington CT, was the slaughter of more than 700 Pequot women and children by Captain John Mason (for whom Mason's Island in Mystic is named) when in 1637 he set fire to their Pequot Fort overlooking the placid Mystic River -- less than a mile from our house.

I could go on about the mistaken impression, repeated in the Wikipedia entries on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that King Philip's War was a native uprising against the colonists and that the natives were "soundly defeated." But you should really read "Our Beloved Kin" instead, which includes a digital companion and, for the Mainers reading this, informative sections on the Wabanaki coast of Maine as well as the Wampanoag's and southern tribes northern migrations to and through Maine as they attempted to escape the colonists.

What I want to convey in this piece instead is the devastation our white settler colonialist ancestors have wreaked on southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. If the fact that New England is not a "hot spot" in climate change is not enough for you, take a drive through these once sacred places and try to remember what the natural world once looked like here. It is next to impossible to do so, the development is so extreme.

Roads roads roads and "private" property prevent one from reaching the Taunton and myriad other rivers -- once teeming with fish and used for sustenance fishing by the Wampanoag. The traffic is intense, and there is barely a field or marsh or square foot of earth without a house, a mall, or a disheveled, suffering little town such as Taunton itself. One does not sense happiness here and most are speeding through it at 80 mph to reach the Cape.

This is what we've wrought over 400 years. The devastation not only of this continent's native peoples but of the earth they once so well stewarded. When the Puritans arrived, they brought with them livestock and an English patriarchal culture inimical to native stewardship of agricultural fields, forests, and waterways. The Wampanoag's practiced crop rotation and field maintenance that allowed them to thrive here for thousands of years. The Puritans livestock trampled these fields, and with the subsequent fencing off of paddocks and "private" property the migration of wildlife was severely crippled.

Climate change is but one symptom of our broken planet, and it is every one of our choices as to how we live that impacts how we proceed. We can all take some simple steps to try to reverse the damage we as white settler colonists have wrought upon this continent -- and on ourselves, and the future of the planet for our descendants. The choices are ours and need to be made every day in regard to all the things we take for granted and to which we feel entitled. And while some of these choices may seem to be a privilege: yes, they are. And we all need to be activating whatever privilege from which we may benefit to improve our culture and save our planet.

* Eat real, not processed, not chemically treated food. Food is sacred (for the Christians out there reading this: think last supper!)

* Do not waste food -- we have so cheapened food with subsidies and processing that many no longer hold it sacred. Food waste is the largest contributor to climate change.

* Drive less

* Stop flying

* Stop buying -- particularly unnecessary containers, plastic, styrofoam, etc. Remember that your power as a consumer is critical to what the market does or does not produce.

* Reuse what you can

* Recycle what you cannot reuse

* Run for office

* Vote in every election as if your life and the lives of others depends upon it: it does. Vote only for those candidates who recognize the need for change in American consumption and culture if we are to save our planet. Vote only for those who treat everyone around them with respect. Vote only for those who believe in being of service to others.

Every choice makes a difference. And our choices are ours. Not always easy to own, and still: ours.

Love Field

I fly in and out of Dallas from its originally airport, Love Field -- where President Kenndy''s Air Force One landed and departed on his deadly visit here in November 1963.

I was 26 months old. A year younger than the President's son.

I don't remember the assassination itself, but watching the funeral on TV is my first real memory.

My mother had taken us to visit her dear friend, Pat Regan, at her tiny Cape in downtown Old Saybrook, CT.

Pat had all the shades pulled down in her living room, creating a deep gloom around her black and white TV. She and my mother sat at the kitchen table just outside the doorway to the room, where they could keep an eye on where they allowed me to sit, transfixed, before the ghostly, flickering screen. The gray images were vague and shifting -- more dream than reality.

The dark, riderless horse with its backward facing boot is the image most lodged in my memory. John John's sad, obedient salute. And my mother and Pat crying behind me. I didn't understand then what had happened, but I knew it was very sad and ran to hug and be held by my mom.

It didn't take me long to understand. My generation was raised in the shadow of political assassinations. Within four years, four of our progressive leaders -- those trying to transition us from the World War II generation to a new era in which our nation might build its own equity across race and gender and spread its immense prosperity to create global equity as well -- were gunned down. Malcolm X (1965). Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968). And Bobby Kennedy (1968). 

The second Kennnedy death sent progressivism reeling -- not knocked out, for the anti-war and feminist and desegregation and gay liberation movements continued. We have continued slowly on our evolutionary path to consciousness as human beings. But our leadership was significantly derailed and has yet to fully recover.

Rather than a President encouraging our leadership and engagement and philanthropy and giving voice to hope -- "The American people expect more from us...For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do..." -- we got a President who resigned before he could be impeached for obstruction of justice around criminal attempts to influence an election in his favor. That was in the 1970s, yet today we find ourselves in an oddly deja vu situation, with a "mob boss" style President fearful that if held accountable for his dishonest tactics then the legitimacy of his presidency will be in question. As it is and should be.

"History, after all, is the memory of a nation." -- President John F. Kennedy

It is Easter weekend and the beginning of Passover. The memory of our nation has much for which to seek reconciliation and to make amends. When will we give up our addiction to those who will lie, bully, and strong arm voters to maintain their power and move fully and joyously toward these different values?

The memory of our nation is one of white brutality. One cannot travel across these beautiful prairies without mourning the wanton destruction of its native inhabitants. The U.S. Army used "total warfare" to wipe out the tribes,  their horses, and their sacred sustenance: the buffalo. "Total warfare" included the use of many tactics that would be prosecuted as war crimes today, from dawn raids on sleeping villages of non-combatants to the decimation of food sources to starve entire peoples.

Kennedy was no saint. He, too, was a child of privilege and he, too, felt entitled to use his privilege to his advantage.

Yet at the same time he also understood his privilege as a duty to make the world more fair and prosperous for others. He made plenty of mistakes in this work -- seeing Communists everywhere as the enemy and engaging U.S. Troops accordingly, for instance -- but his enduring legacy is to ask each of us,  and especially America's young people, to ask "not what your country can do for you, ask what you an do for your country...ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."