Poetry and Photosynthesis: It's all in the Leaves

At the farm last Sunday, Stephen Collins performed a solo play about Walt Whitman, Unlaunch’d Voices, by Michael Z. Keamy. Whitman, as the play begins, grumbles about the poor reception for his book, Leaves of Grass — his life work, his own body, his soul! They didn’t even like the title, he complained. The critics pointed out that grass doesn’t have leaves, it has spears, and protested that the poetry was bombastic, egotistical, and vulgar. He garnered a few good, anonymous reviews, that is, written by himself. Today, Leaves of Grass is one of greatest songs of America. Take heart writers and artists! You may never know the value of the gifts you are offering.

Our performance was outdoors, the first time that Collins had performed in plein air. Collins, all 6’ 5” of him, flung his gallant arms to the sky and strode along the pond edge. At times I felt as if he might plunge in with a big splash, but he remained well-rooted to the ground. Collin’s portrait of Whitman resembled a great tree waving its leaves, encouraging, praising, admonishing, and loving all at once, a great giving creature.

Trees are giving creatures, too, turning carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars. When the heavens provide enough rain, sun, and warmth, the tree makes lots of sugars. In fact, trees feed these sugars down to the fungi, which live attached to the roots. Later, if a tree calls for food, the fungi send any surplus back up. Trees are also companionable. Scientists have injected radioactive isotopes into a tree in order to follow the sugar flow and have watched it move down to the forest floor and up into the trunk of a neighboring tree.

Deciduous trees release their leaves in the fall. They rest for the winter, and then have to produce another full set of leaves in spring if they are going to survive. No leaves, and death comes quite quickly. Our apples trees have been stressed all summer from the drought. Early in the season we could irrigate, but then the wetlands' water level dropped too low, and the intake for the pump clogs with weeds. It’s good our apple trees weren’t carrying a load of fruit.

Macintosh Trees with no Apples, LH photo, Sept, 2016

In 2012, we also had no fruit. This was a puzzle to both growers and scientists. No one could quite pin down the reason, though many hazarded guesses. Now, once again, we have been in severe drought conditions, and the trees have no fruit. We had some blossoms in April, but it was much fewer than I would have expected (even taking into consideration the 2015 bumper crop). We had bitter cold in February, which is when New England lost the peach crop, and then the freeze in April seemed to have taken the apple blossoms. That’s one way to explain why we have no apples, but I think there is something else we don’t know about in the equation.

Something that the trees know.

Who is to say that the trees didn’t see severe drought crawling towards us long before we experienced it, and they did what they needed to do to prepare? They let go of their possessions, their precious fruit, and kept their leaves so they could sustain themselves through the desert conditions. We are only beginning to discover the wisdom in leaves and trees. Scientists recently found that when a tree is dying, it will get rid of its excess carbon by sending it to a healthy neighbor.

There is equally great wisdom in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God .  .  .  read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem . . .

This week our Sunday afternoon farm event is the 4th annual plein air poetry walk. The poets of Old Frog Pond Farm will gather to walk the land and read their poems at the sites that inspired their leaves. Splash is this year’s theme — join us at 2pm — as organizer Susan Edwards Richmond leads us around the pond and through the orchard.

I have never

bent grateful

as this blade of grass,

bearing the hiss, ping ping

sound of insufficient blessing

on my naked, needy back.

—from the poem “Hiss, ping, ping” by Lucinda Bowen

Cover of "Splash Plein Air Poetry", Painting by Martha Wakefield

In the Plenty of Time

In his autobiographical book, The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday, describes summer on the plain in Oklahoma where he spent his childhood: “Great green-and-yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time.”

I loved that phrase, going nowhere in the plenty of time. It reminded me of my time in New Guinea with my mother. No running water or electricity, but plenty of bugs, plants, sweat, babies crying, dogs barking, men with shaved heads and men with long hair, women wearing only grass skirts or thin calico shifts. When I talk about this experience, people always ask, what did you do there? 

LH in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, 1971

We would sit, walk to another hamlet in the village, walk out to the road to wait for a truck which might or might not come, make flower leis, braid dry grasses, roast beetles and eat them, maybe play cat’s cradle. Some villagers went to their gardens to dig up taro root or yams – their gardens looked just like the rest of the forest. There might be coconuts to gather and a delicious pudding to make. Smoking, of course, (but I didn’t), rolling sticky black tobacco in pieces of old newspaper; and chewing betelnut (slightly hallucinogenic) — mixing it with a little mustard and powdered lime that would turn bright red when you spit the combination out after chewing (I did a little.)

Elder women swept the bare ground clear of leaf litter every morning and burned their collections in small fires. Younger women walked to a cave a mile away to bring back the day’s drinking water.

The women sometimes would sit on the ground with legs out straight, a board with carved patterns on their lap, scraping sharp shells over fresh banana leaves, pressing them into this board to make doba, their currency. Men might be working on a wood carving to sell in the main town to a tourist or at the Methodist mission. All of this was going nowhere in the plenty of time.

 There were highlights of course. The night a man died and we entered the hut to see his body laid out over his daughters’ legs. The mourners wailed, and then when the crying lapsed, they told stories and laughed. They decorated him with bands of red and white paint. And on my last night (my mother was staying on), one of the big chiefs announced he would kill a chicken! The villagers were ecstatic – they knew that this meant he would kill a pig, and we would feast and dance. They never did explain just how they knew.

Life seemed more about just living, not about producing. It was the fabric of relationships that always needed tending. Relationships between lovers, husbands and wives, children, clans, mother’s brothers, brother’s sisters, uncles, and when there was a death — the real work began. Mourning took many forms and was done by many people. Some blackened their bodies for a year, someone carried the deceased’s purse, which held his lime stick and lime pot, others shaved their heads. All of these mourners would eventually need to be paid back in elaborate ceremonies acknowledging their gifts of mourning, paid back with large baskets of doba, those banana leaf bundles, (that I carried on my head in the photo from last week’s blog.)

N. Scott Momaday returned to Rainy Mountain after the death of his grandmother and recalls his experience of the life that went on all around her:

There were frequent prayer meetings, and great nocturnal feasts. When I was a child, I played with my cousins outside, where the lamplight fell upon the ground and the singing of the old people rose up around us and carried away into the darkness. There were lots of good things to eat, a lot of laughter and surprise. And afterwards, when the quiet returned, I lay down with my grandmother and could hear the frogs away by the river and feel the motion of air.

Wind Sculpture, Michio Ihara     photo:Robert Hesse at Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio

I think about our Western fixation with time, with spending it wisely, with being productive, and compare it to the importance of being together, nurturing relationships, doing everything in the plenty of time.

we watched the crows

hard pears

in no hurry to ripen

—LH

Witch Doctors

To return to my dying Asian pear tree that I wrote about a month ago: I finally did call the nursery. The horticulturalist assured me that the tree was certainly a Hosui variety – because Hosui get fire blight very easily – and he was certain it was fire blight.

“Pull it right out!” he commanded. “Fire blight will spread to the other trees.” He added that you have to be super vigilant with Hosui, which essentially means spraying Streptomycin in the spring when fire blight is a possibility. He said many people plant Kosui instead of the Hosui, but even that variety isn’t all that resistant. Not like Olympic, for example. “Orchardists are always pulling the Hosui and replanting with more resistant varieties.

I didn’t ask, “Why then, are you selling them?”

It turns out that my tree isn’t a Hosui or a Kosui – it’s a Niitaka.  And even though every leaf blackened and fell, I decided to try and save the tree using a poultice of carbonatite, clay, and aloe, and some rubbing and mumblings. After a week, I was excited to see that a few of the buds were plumping and showing some green tissue. Now a witch doctor is an interesting phenomenon.

Dr. Annette Weiner, Kwaibwaga Village, Trobriand Islands, 1989 

I had an experience firsthand when I lived with my anthropologist mother on a small coral atoll in New Guinea. Ours was an inland village, but one day some of my mother’s informants (the anthropological jargon for those who provide answers to the anthropologist’s questions) said, let’s go visit a coastal village. We walked a few miles over sharp coral to the far side of the island. As we neared the coastal village, I was struck by the trees we walked by. Their roots were above ground, tall intertwining webs formed tent-like structures that I could imagine hiding inside of. 

When we entered the village, we felt oddly unwelcomed. The men were out fishing and the women were wary. That’s when I got something in one of my eyes. A piece of dirt or an insect. My eye stung, but no one could see anything in it. After hanging out for only a short while, we turned around to make the trip home. The suspicious looks from the villagers didn’t feel good, and we didn’t want to cause trouble.

We traveled back through the forest of amazing trees, back along the rough coral trails, and finally entered our village towards nightfall. By the time we were back, I was feverish and dizzy. Word buzzed around the village. Questions were asked.  Had anyone said magic to protect me against flying witches. Flying witches inhabit the buttressed roots of those mysterious trees. Of course, the witches are jealous of young girls. They were certain that I had been attacked by a flying witch.

My mother was nervous. Even though she had aspirin and antibiotics to give me, and we were both taking quinine for malaria, she wondered what it could be. She was also fascinated to know what the villagers would do. They told her they had called a witch doctor from another village who specializes in flying witches. A skinny old man came in carrying his satchel of herbs. He checked me over, bending my limbs, looking into my eyes. He rubbed herbs into my skin and mumbled prayers. He was paid. And when my mother looked at him expectantly, he said, “The witch is only playing with your daughter; it won’t kill her.”

LH in Kwaibwaga Village in 1971 (fully recovered)

Norman Cousins, one of the early proponents of the mind-body connection, relates how when he visited the Schweitzer Hospital in Gabon, Africa, he commented to Dr. Schweitzer, “The local people are lucky to have access to the Schweitzer clinic and not have to depend on witch-doctor supernaturalism.” One look at Dr. Schweitzer and Cousins recognized his ignorance. The next day, Dr. Schweitzer took him to observe native African medicine. The witch doctor gave herbs in a brown paper bag to some patients and incantations in a brown paper bag to others, while still others he directed towards the Western doctor.

 Dr. Schweitzer explained the three groups. The first had what he called functional issues; these would go away easily and the herbs would help. The next group had what he called psychogenic problems, and they were treated with African psychotherapy. The third had physical problems, like a tumor or broken bone, and these he sent to the Western doctor. When Cousins pushed for an explanation, Schweitzer said,

The witch doctor succeeds for the same reason all the rest of us succeed. Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us knowing the truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides inside within each patient a chance to go to work.   

—From The Mysterious Placebo, Norman Cousins

I believe plants aren’t so different from us. There is a doctor inside the trees that I hope I can motivate. I don't know if it has fire blight or a fungal disease. But rather than pull it, I will wait and see if its own wisdom along with my herbs will help.

Listen Coyote

A large silver coyote approached me in a clearing in the woods where I stood.  She seemed hungry and threatening and I was terrified. So terrified that I couldn't find my voice to shout or wildly wave my arms to scare her away.  I turned to run and then saw that coyotes were coming out of the woods and approaching from all directions. They would surely tear my body apart and feast on my bloodied limbs. 

I considered this picture, then paused for a moment. Something in me changed. “No!” I screamed and I began madly gesticulating The coyotes were silenced as if struck mute, and they turned back in the direction from where they had come. I woke up with a good feeling — something I use as a barometer for my dreaming.  Inside the fear, I was paralyzed, but when I found my ground and let go of my fear, I could act effectively. This change happened in a split second. There was no lengthy dialogue, but there was a listening, a facing the reality of the situation without projections.

Photo:LH

I had another experience with a coyote — a real one!  I was alone meditating in the winter in the hut behind the orchard. The snow was deep and I had snowshoed out to the hut. I entered, left the window shades down for extra warmth, lit a stick of incense, a candle, and took my seat. In the Zen meditation I practice, you don’t move during a sitting period. You don’t shift position, scratch an itch, or brush off a mosquito. You sit through it all, accepting everything with all the equanimity you can muster.

As I was sitting, I began to feel an eerie presence; someone was outside the hut.  I decided to go against all of my Zen training and get up from my meditation cushion. I cautiously pulled up the shade. A great silver coyote stared into my eyes. She gazed and I gaped back unblinking for more than a minute. Then she turned and plunged into the deep snow, and I sat back down enlivened by the gift of her presence. The coyote must have been sleeping under the hut, which sits on pillars a foot off the ground, when she realized I was inside.

Tamarack Song, a tracker and guide who uses traditional hunter-gatherer skills he learned from elders and aboriginal people all over the world, writes of his early apprenticeship:

            Irritated by my endless string of questions while I tagged after him [a Blackfoot Elder], he turned around and said, “Tamarack, when you talk, there’s no room for listening. When you ask a question, you are not really questioning, because you think you know what you need to learn. If you’d let yourself listen, you’d get answers to the questions you don’t know how to ask.  Only when we listen do we learn .  .  .

The Blackfoot elder is instructing Tamarack to really listen to the person who is speaking to him; he is also telling Tamarack to trust his inner voice. My experience with the coyote in the snow affirmed that it was good to listen to my inner voice and not rigidly follow a set of rules. Of course, I wouldn’t stand up in the middle of the Meditation Hall with a hundred other meditators, but in my own hut, alone, I could, and I was grateful that I did.

Lately, I’ve been trying to listen to this inner voice — to really hear it, to be a better listener. It’s not easy. It’s hard to distinguish it from all the yips and yaps, my own desires and judgements. That’s why silence is so important. It’s only in silence that we hear. Mozart is supposed to have said, “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence in between.” The book I was reading yesterday attributed the same quotation to Debussy. I guess it doesn’t matter who said it. The gift of listening is that it takes us to a place we might not have gone on our own.

Inside the Wave, Sculpture:LH