December, Ending - Queen Snows

I was surprised by the disappointment and sense of loss I felt because my plan to have a vegetable plot in a farmer's nearby field did not come to be. I found I missed the sweetness and mystery of the faces Sweet Heart and I loved, practically instantly. Out of that sadness came the poem "I Will Keep Broken Things."

In this way:
True to his empathetic spirit, Wise Heart said to me, as he stacked row upon row of red ginger that he'd removed from what will hopefully be our next garden in our yard, "Que Piensas? (What do you think?: which is how we both start many a conversation) Maybe we should give some of these flowers to Snows" -the English translation of Nieves, which is La Senora's name. I was delighted by the thought! There had been many medicinal plants around their house, but no flowers. Yes! I said. Excellent. And so he took the plants to Snows, and in return we received, from Queen Snows, so naturally elegant in her generosity, a bushel of pepinos (cucumbers)!

And so I was taught, again, that the original of anything may be broken, but what is left can be usefully different and often well worth keeping. Our connection survived.

"I Will Keep Broken Things" is in the Journal section of the website: http://www.alicewalkersgarden.com/alicewalkerjournal.html

©2008 Alice Walker

Overwhelm

December #8

The first morning we went out to the farm at which my ant free produce might grow, we found a huge field had been raked over by somebody else's tractor, since the farm's vehicle needed much more work. It was a vast field. I tried to explain once again that I had wanted an area more like a large rug, not something broad enough to play soccer. I once again pointed out the area: just between these four palm trees, por favor. Esto es suficiente. Fine. Leaving offerings to take care of the tractor, the diesel for the tractor, pump repair, and several other necessities, we left with the understanding that by Sabado all would be ready. Three days! Excitement was building, not only in me, the farmer (small time though I might be), but also in Sweet Heart, who has never farmed and knows little about it, preferring to grow music from his golden trumpeta. Saturday morning, at dawn, we were at the farmer's gate: not only us, but other helpers who had volunteered and joined us along the way. However, first of all, there was an enormous dog fight occurring at the gate, which right away felt like an ill omen. Half a dozen dogs, snarling, growling, barking, biting. So early in the morning it seemed surreal. However, courage. But then, behind them, we began to see las vacas, cows, many of them, loose in the farmer's corn field. And to make matters worse, they were ankle deep in water.

The farmer, perhaps I should call him Overwhelmed Heart, came up to the car to tell us what we were seeing: his neighbors’ cows had broken his fence, come into his corn field, were eating his corn. Que lastima! More than that, they had managed to break his water pipes, which we could see were made out of fragile white plastic, and the result was a flooded field. Oy vey! My tiny, rug-like patch of land, surrounded by the soccer field, was flooded and would not be dry enough to plant anything for at least three days! Could we come back then? Si.

Wise Heart, with his typical compassion, opted to check on the situation for us, to prevent our tumbling out of our cozy beds to no purpose. Three days later we asked for a report. Nothing's moving, he said. Neither the cows, now the water level. Besides, Overwhelmed Heart says another field is too much work. Considering the overwhelm I had received on viewing the cleared soccer field, I agreed with him.

What is the lesson? Today I am feeling regretful that my Spanish, after all these years of study and learning, is still so poor I can't sufficiently emphasize the difference between rug-size and soccer field size. And I wonder, as well, if my approach was somehow wrong. Longer meditation might help me here.

One lesson seems to be to recommit to my own yard and garden, and to take my stand here. Wise Heart and I immediately decided to tear out the humungous stand of red ginger and palmas that was about to eat the side yard, and to plant collards, okra, kale and garlic there. With two other young men he went at it with a will, and made a circular bed ten feet across. The roots of the palmas are still there, however, and will be hard to remove.

I woke this morning feeling reckless: I will just put seeds there anyway. Maybe most of the plants will be devoured by hornmigas, or strangled by palmas roots, but maybe a few will survive for us.

Alice Walker© 2008

The Clarity

December #7

Setting out collard starts in a bed where they may be eaten by ants overnight, I had some insights: One was that some old, unconscious programming is still alive and well in my head, and probably in my whole body. I was becoming tired from bending, and hot from the morning sun, which, though delightful at eight was not so at ten. My body and I, conversing, as bodies and minds will, said: I think it's time to do some watering of the new plants, because they need it, having just been set out, but also, it will give your lower back a chance to recover. Fine. I immediately looked about for the hose. However, the old internalized voice: whose? Father, Mother, Grandparent, older sibling, teacher? Said: Now, now, you must always finish what you start! Never stop in the middle! But this is how I've always worked, I thought, remarking the voice, but asserting myself. And that is why I have been able to work so much. By taking breaks that change, if only slightly, the work's direction.

I'm a writer, probably because I could not abide a job that required repetition. Hardest for me was a job I had for a summer once, as a file clerk. The monotony bored me. I will always feel I left a part of my life in that office. I could have done so much more there than file, left to my freedom; if only the bosses had understood that. Anyway, I have reached the period of life where it is a joy, really, to ignore ancient programming. I not only watered the tiny plants that I may never, after today, see again, but I sat right down and ate a papaya.

The second insight was: When I am mad at another person, I make myself mad. Now this is probably insight 101 to all Dharma bums everywhere. But it seemed really fresh, this morning. I was in a snit because my greens were not high as my knee, already, and because so many previous efforts (more anon) to grow them had failed. So when someone sweetly asked if he could help me, I, exasperated, said: I needed help three months ago. I think I'm so small I can never terrorize anyone, but I think my response was dampening, at least. And then, for the next hour, I worried over it, still being mad, while he went off to do some other wonderful thing that he's good at. And that's when it came to me: Being mad at him made me mad. He had nothing really to do with it. Although in truth he could have planted the collard starts three months ago, since that is his job. Even so.

This is one reason I love mornings! And gardening meditation. The clarity!
The stretched muscles! The cleansing of the pores through sweating! The reward of fresh fruit!

Alice Walker ©2008

The Victory Belongs To Love

December #6
So what about marriage?

It seems to me such a private affair, to which one invites only the public that one loves. I was married once, illegally, as has been well documented. I was very much in love with the man I married, and could not agree with the state that his color made him unacceptable for matrimony. But there has been such a long history of intrusion into matrimony in our country, in the world, I suppose, that this certainly seems a good time to interrogate it. To look for instance at the ban against enslaved people marrying, and how they coped with that. What could they do, really. There they were, these brown and black and tan and chocolate and yes, alabaster, lovers, wanting more than anything to do the right thing by the community and church (although "church" too, for them, was banned for quite a long time). No public sanction for you, they were told. You can't marry because you're not even human beings, you're property. And sure enough Ole Miss and Big Miss and Master Bubba could at any time sell the bride-to-be and the groom-to-be a thousand miles downriver. In separate directions. What would have been the use of nuptials then?

I never intended to marry. But when a handsome prince appeared, and I faced the illegality of claiming and being claimed by him, it seemed a no-brainer. Whose business was it who I married? In what way was my happiness an affront to theirs, assuming they had any? Which I doubted because, having observed people who spent more than a few minutes digging into other people's personal love intentions, I realized they had no similar love to be fascinated by in their own. Think of all the times you've been content with your affectional choices and your life. How much time did you spend wondering about what other folks, especially those two kissing and hugging over by the elevator, did. Did ante-bellum (before the War) folks care about society, and family and civilization? Could one honestly say that slave-owners cared about any of this? Impregnating their own relatives and offspring, selling their children who, because of their mother's condition were now slaves, and, through sheer avarice destroying, through overproduction of crops, the very earth beneath them, as they did?

It was Daniel Ortega* who said "The Victory Belongs to Love." It was the most astonishing of the things I heard and experienced on a trip to Nicaragua during the Sandinista Government's battle against the Contras. There he was, with his wife, Rosario, having fathered nine children, all of them, if I remember correctly, boys. I still remember the charm of their wooden house that seemed to have no real walls, only partitions made of tall house plants. Flowers were everywhere; and, rocking chairs. Over a half dozen of them. And art. It was a wonderful house, or non-house. They seemed not so much to live there as to float through it, as we did, their guests. I did not fail to notice Ortega's trips to the refrigerator, however, and the thick rows of of cold Coca-Cola cans. Even sipping a coke, grateful for the snowy fizz in the tropical heat, I thought: Oops. Almost free.

So what does this have to do with marriage? Something about choices, I think: how to live, where to live, what are the whimsies and challenges each of us deserves to make for ourselves. Nobody yet being perfectly evolved. Five thousand years of something that makes people unhappy, is long, but given the age of the planet it’s almost nothing. Besides, we now know that Mother rule, which preceded patriarchy, smiled then, as now, on love, whatever its orientation. The way god sent him, is how a recent Oaxaca mother described her gay son.

Besides, the same God who restricted marriage to a woman and man also gave man dominion over the earth. 'Nuff said.

Almost two years ago I awakened to the realization that I felt married to my dog and my cat. This feeling arose in me: that I would willingly assume responsibility for them for the rest of our lives. That I would love and honor and cherish them. That together we were a family. Calling in a priestess friend, we arranged a wedding ceremony, which was beautiful. Was this an affront to the marriages of men and women, so many of which end in divorce? I don't think so. I experienced it as a strengthener of spirit, a movement forward in my growing ability to connect with animals other than human. I've sometimes wondered how the event felt to them. My dog, Marley, died within months, well loved and well cared for to the end. My cat, Surprise, reigns in our household, secure in her recognized place of queen.

I sent out invitations to our ceremony that read: Marriage Happens! Because that is how it seems to me. That you go along in a relationship of whatever kind, and one day it dawns on you: this is it for life. In truth, you're already married, when this happens, but perhaps it is human nature to want to share our joy.

*President of Nicaragua in the Eighties, and currently.

Alice Walker ©2008

Hitting the Mark

December #5

Muntadar al- Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who tried to hit George Bush with his shoe, has captured the world's imagination, causing each of us to wonder: if we had the opportunity, what would we use to hit Bush? I am the least violent person I know: I cannot imagine hitting anyone, though I do not deny an occasional urge to strike out when words and careful ceremony fail me. I literally pray to be non-violent, having learned from observing over half a century of violence, how incredibly stupid it is. Thinking about this, in Mexico, during the 12 day celebration of the Virgin de Guadalupe, where children in white, their parents and neighbors beside them, march in procession in every little village, I have had a thoughtful time, holding these opposites: a world that still honors the feminine face of God, the Goddess, and a world that seems, by now, almost entirely masculine, where something so wonderful as a dog is considered contemptible, and the earth, from which everything is given to us, even more so. Whatever touches the earth is blessed, in my view, and what is of more humble service to mankind, than the shoe?

Still, I do realize cultures differ.

With what would I hit Bush? This man who has caused so much suffering, death, despair and pain?

Remember how Bob Marley sang: Hit me with music, hit me with music, now. Hit me with music, because when it hits you feel no pain? I think of this – what a genius he was, making us think in new ways, almost constantly – and I think of George Bush. About whom I have tried not to think too much, over the years. What I would hit Bush with, and what I think we all need to consider hitting him with is....understanding. I may be completely mistaken, but it is my sense that no one understands this person. I remember once, sitting in Chinatown with a Chinese family the night Bush was re-selected as president of the country. We were all of us feeling despair, but it took the eldest person at our table, a grandmother with wispy white hair, to put into words some of what we felt. She simply couldn’t believe Bush had been placed at the “top” as she put it of the country. Shaking her head, frowning, totally incredulous, speaking partly in dialect, she refused to believe he was the people’s choice. But why do you think it’s impossible that Americans have chosen him, asked one of us. Because, she said, as if it were the most obvious thing on earth: he has the eyes of a thief. That is the way people in the old days used to think, to size people up, to save the community and the family a lot of trouble. What happened to this ability?

We don’t understand Bush. I don’t. I remember marching, alongside millions of other people, against the war, speaking out against the war, being arrested protesting the war, all the while thinking: It is really strange that Bush ignores us. We knew perfectly well what happens during war: people are mutilated, murdered, made homeless and things even worse. He had to know this too. And then the long years of every ominous prophecy being fulfilled: hundreds of thousands murdered, raped, butchered, burned, bombed. Children blasted away in their orphanages, young girls raped before their parents’ eyes. There have been days and nights over the past eight years when I, like so many others, could not sleep. We knew what it meant when the media talked about things being more “calm.” Our neighborhoods would be calm too, we muttered, if nobody still lived there, but had fled to some other country where they suffered the indignity of being unwanted refugees. Very calm and peaceful too, are the dead and buried. But to our haggard faces, Bush turned a beaming countenance, year after year. And even now. He plans to leave the White House, he beams, move into a new place, start building his library and write his memoirs. His memoirs. If I understood him better I could tell him, there’s going to be a little child sprawled bleeding behind every page. What I understand so far is that the suffering of that bleeding child is not the story he’s interested in telling, and this makes it all the more necessary that we ask ourselves, as a country that elected/selected him: who is this?

The world’s people will demand that we get to know this man, so as not to let another like him loose on them. There will be more than talk about war crimes and crimes against humanity, fairly soon, for Bush and all those who collaborated with him in bringing such terror – shock and awe, indeed – to the earth. We might as well get ready for it. But thoughtfully. The least Americans can do to show we recognize our complicity in the wrongful assault on a country that did us no harm is to honor our own history of a belief, finally, in justice. Justice for the “evil-doers”we permitted to lead us; no more and no less. We will have to hit Bush with something. And it won’t be a shoe. But it will be meaningless beyond words, if we hit him only with vengeance or revenge or simple hatred, in an attempt to attach all the blame for our disaster to someone so out of touch, not only with reality, but with himself, as he appears to be.

As for the Iraqi journalist, I would wish to have the courage to express my outrage in such a well aimed and culturally apt way, if I were in his position. George Bush has destroyed his country, abused his people and disappeared countless children, colleagues and friends. I understand him; at least I understand his behavior, completely.

©2008 Alice Walker

Seeking Counsel from Diego and Frida

December #4

My friends don’t want me to be stressed out by the violence, caused by drugs, that is occurring in Mexico, and the attempts of the government to expose and bring to justice those who are harming Mexican society so grievously. When we walk along the streets in Mexico City, with its ubiquitous fountains and wonderful art, a city I like a lot, though breathing the air, after a few days, is a challenge, they snatch me away from kiosks where there are screaming headlines and lurid pictures of the latest atrocities. Brutal and grotesque messages from the drug cartels. I recognize and share the suffering I see in their eyes. It is our own suffering in the United States, as we’ve watched our disintegrating communities struggle against an enemy so implacably cruel that it is almost impossible to know how to respond to it. Countless lives have been broken, utterly, by this unequal and unexpected fight. And we have been abandoned by our government. In fact, our government has played for the other side. That this suffering should befall anyone is tragic, but that it should befall the people of Mexico, legendary for their warmth and hospitality, their generosity and patience, is deeply painful. So like ourselves they are, and have been.

Going into Frida and Diego’s house and studio, her side blue, his white, I am troubled for the people, and the country, they loved so much. And that I also love. They did not live in these times; what would they make of them? Inside, I saw, on a small round rug, a pair of Diego’s shoes. Enormous. I placed my own bare foot beside his shoe. Tiny, by comparison. I thought of their connected lives, their deep trust that in finding each other they had discovered a way to reach what was most profound, and perhaps most challenging, in themselves. What would they say to the people of Mexico today? Would they ask Mexicans, who so bravely fought a revolution, over a hundred years ago, to free themselves from foreign and domestic oppression, to remember to look for the root of their present calamity: poverty, hopelessness, too many children, beloveds, and kin, left behind in the wake of mass migrations North? Too many humiliations, brutalities and deaths, of people trying simply to locate, on this broad earth, a better life for those crossing borders and those left behind? To think of the loneliness, the desperation, the feeling of abandonment by everything that speaks of ease and joy in life. And naked hunger, and literal emptiness, that for a moment a drug can mask. It would be horrible, I think, for them to contemplate the wall that the United States has built in its attempt to keep Mexicans - whose hard work keeps so much of our economy going – out of Gringolandia (Frida’s word). I can imagine Frida’s proud scorn, and Diego’s bellow of defiance.

No one profits ultimately from the humiliation of others. Surely this is a law.

Hold dear your families and especially your children, which has always been paramount, for you, I imagine Frida and Diego saying. Insist on government that responds to your suffering, and if it does not respond, change it. This is a harsh passage, but only that; there will be, there must be, an end. The drug war is not just Mexico’s and not just the United States’ but a global struggle. It is for the people of the planet to say No to every kind of enslavement. Every kind of violence. They must gather in whatever ways they can to make their stand for the sake of humanity. Above all, do not abandon your faith that you can change your environment. You are a revolutionary people, a proven model for the world. Many people stand taller for the course your ancestors pursued. It is the consciousness of the whole world that has to change, and that change is happening. Not because of human enlightenment, necessarily, either, but because the earth is sending its own messages of atrocity that are far grimmer than those sent by the drug lords, in the form of earthquakes, fires, droughts, hurricanes and floods. Human beings will awaken to these noticias (news reports) from La Madre, (The Mother), or perish.

Giving, As Generously As The Earth

December #3

As the hornmigas appear to be winning this year, I have had to take other measures. Neither Sweet Heart nor I wish to be without our own patch of collards, no matter where we are! So, we went with friends to visit a small family farm near Villa (named for Pancho) and asked if, in exchange for a financial offering, I might create a small garden on their land: for peanuts, collards, sweet potatoes, okra, beans. They have land, a few hectares near the river, but no cash. Farmers around the world face this predicament. They live in a dwelling considerably smaller and less substantial than the shacks my family inhabited when I was a child: constructed of tin, a few slabs of wood, a dirt floor. It was like visiting my own family, in the 1950s, in fact. A mother, father, and one small, friendly, daughter with, apparently, Down Syndrome. La Senora, graying, bright-eyed, and energetic, talked a mile a minute, while Sweet Heart helped El Senor to drag a huge mangera, hose, to drip irrigate what looked like a long row of fledgling papaya trees. Before long we were smiling, at ease with each other. In fact, being with them felt right; as if we already belonged to each other. We didn't want to leave: talking the while about broken down tractors (his); her missing goats (I think they had to eat them), how much I would like the cheese she makes if she still had goats, the medicinal plants that surround their house: for diabetes, arthritis, and liver troubles. In my excitement that they had chickens, for which I lust, I immediately thought of eggs, which, turning around, I saw she'd brought me. Eleven of them, exactly, as the hens and roosters responsible for this bounty, strutted about proudly. She also gave me several calabasas, pumpkin/squash like vegetables, which my friend, Organizer Heart, who had introduced us, told me would make delicious soup.

I was reminded of why, as a child on a “poor” sharecroppers farm, I never thought we were poor. Because we were always giving. It was giving, as generously as the earth did, that made us feel we had plenty. In fact, my sense of this family - the husband and wife unselfconsciously holding hands, while talking to us - was that they were richer than almost anyone I'd met lately.

Alice Walker ©2008

Facing La Madre

December #2

Facing La Madre, the fountain.

Meditation. Sweeping. Making and drinking tea. Speaking Spanish with Manuel, whom I have named, to myself, Wise Heart. Because he is one of the wisest people I know.

Yesterday a beautiful black or dark brown snake came into the doorway. I called Sweet Heart, my partner in these adventures, who gently picked it up and placed it back into the garden.

Finally, the right spirit!

No question at all of harming it; only admiration for its sleek and fearless regalness. I felt the closing of a circle in my life, regarding snakes. From wonder and fascination (which I would have experienced as an infant),to the heavy indoctrination of my church and parents; to having fear and loathing instilled in me; then coming around again to wonder and admiration.

This little one, about 2 years old, Sweet Heart thought, was a gopher (or Mexican equivalent) snake.

Next day, Wise Heart encountered a huge rattler in the road. He took a photo of it and helped it on its way. In Spanish it is called "cascabel."

Jumpy and weird yesterday because I opened my computer and found myself in the news. Emory presenting my talk as I gave my papers to the University earlier this year. It is odd, unexpectedly seeing one's self in this way. I feel far away from that sweet persona, in that role. Here, we worry about ants, "las hornmigas", eating everything we plant.

We've been studying further uses of our magical Vita-Mix. We can make compost with it. This excites us no end. Sweet Heart made almost a quart of liquid compost from the remains of our breakfast green smoothie. Banana peels, eggshells, apple cores, etc. I poured it over the collard and arugula starts.

Sweet Heart is practicing scales and I should be too! I can now play "Amazing Grace" and half of "Lift Every Voice and Sing!" Which I love. Generous Heart at East Bay Church of Religious Science in Oakland is one teacher; Sweet Heart is the other. Between them and my Keyboard I am coming back to the lessons I left when I was eight or nine years old.

Another circle, longing to close, closing.

Alice Walker ©2008

Milagros de la Vida - Turtles

December #1

Today, a few hours before sunset, I went with friends to place sixty-four tiny turtles back into the ocean. They had come ashore months before as embryos in their mothers' bodies. The mothers had laid the soft, leathery, eggs in deep, under-sand nests, covered them carefully, and left them to hatch, before returning to the ocean's depths. My sweetheart and I had walked our dog along their nesting trail in May, marveling at the igloo like bubbles that covered the beach. Now, in early December, under large plastic buckets, dozens of baby turtles wriggled and crawled, over and over each other, and into our lucky hands.

That is what I felt, incredibly lucky to be there to help them go home. Home to a giant sea that, even as we lifted the tiny dark gray milagros de la vida (miracles of life) from the sand, roared and crashed against the shore, sending foam and spray well above our heads.

I have been coming to this beach in Mexico, this same stretch of ocean, for twenty years; but never at the right time. Usually I have been writing in such seclusion I've missed this astonishing event. Two years ago I came to help with the turtles for the first time. It was one of my most intense spiritual experiences. Them, so dark, suede scaled, and determined; me, speechless to find them so tiny that five of them, if they were still, might fit in one hand; yet knowing their way home. Scooping them out of the bucket, we barely had a moment to prevent them from falling from our hands, before they, flippers working ceaselessly, followed the smell of the sea, the spray on their bodies, and began making a dash, their kind of dash, more like a happy waddle, to the water. Going back to Mother.

Not many of them will survive their journey to adulthood. They will fall prey to many predators before they are the huge size a few of them will attain. But some will make it, and come ashore years from now as mothers themselves, ready to start the cycle all over again. I said to my sweetheart how odd it must seem to the turtles to have lived eons without needing the help of humans to keep their numbers viable, after having been hunted almost to extinction. Then I thought of how long it would take for our intervention in the cycle to become a part of what the turtles expect; a part of their DNA. We laughed, thinking of the baby turtles to come, scrambling around in the coming thousands of years, patiently waiting for us. Where's that human hand that's supposed to appear around about now, they would ask themselves. We laughed more, if soberly, hoping that, with still more luck, we - as that human hand - would always, if still needed, be there.

Copyright © Alice Walker 2008