Shrinking Women

I just ran across an amazing video of a slam poet, Lily Myers.  Check it out:

Shrinking Women

Here's the text:

Across from me at the kitchen table, my mother smiles over red wine that she drinks out of a measuring glass.
She says she doesn't deprive herself,
but I've learned to find nuance in every movement of her fork.
In every crinkle in her brow as she offers me the uneaten pieces on her plate.
I've realized she only eats dinner when I suggest it.
I wonder what she does when I'm not there to do so.

Maybe this is why my house feels bigger each time I return; it's proportional.
As she shrinks the space around her seems increasingly vast.
She wanes while my father waxes. His stomach has grown round with wine, late nights, oysters, poetry. A new girlfriend who was overweight as a teenager, but my dad reports that now she's "crazy about fruit."

It was the same with his parents;
as my grandmother became frail and angular her husband swelled to red round cheeks, rotund stomach
and I wonder if my lineage is one of women shrinking
making space for the entrance of men into their lives
not knowing how to fill it back up once they leave.

I have been taught accommodation.
My brother never thinks before he speaks.
I have been taught to filter.
"How can anyone have a relationship to food?" He asks, laughing, as I eat the black bean soup I chose for its lack of carbs.
I want to tell say: we come from difference, Jonas,
you have been taught to grow out
I have been taught to grow in
you learned from our father how to emit, how to produce, to roll each thought off your tongue with confidence, you used to lose your voice every other week from shouting so much
I learned to absorb
I took lessons from our mother in creating space around myself
I learned to read the knots in her forehead while the guys went out for oysters
and I never meant to replicate her, but
spend enough time sitting across from someone and you pick up their habits

that's why women in my family have been shrinking for decades.
We all learned it from each other, the way each generation taught the next how to knit
weaving silence in between the threads
which I can still feel as I walk through this ever-growing house,
skin itching,
picking up all the habits my mother has unwittingly dropped like bits of crumpled paper from her pocket on her countless trips from bedroom to kitchen to bedroom again,
Nights I hear her creep down to eat plain yogurt in the dark, a fugitive stealing calories to which she does not feel entitled.
Deciding how many bites is too many
How much space she deserves to occupy.

Watching the struggle I either mimic or hate her,
And I don't want to do either anymore
but the burden of this house has followed me across the country
I asked five questions in genetics class today and all of them started with the word "sorry".
I don't know the requirements for the sociology major because I spent the entire meeting deciding whether or not I could have another piece of pizza
a circular obsession I never wanted but

inheritance is accidental
still staring at me with wine-stained lips from across the kitchen table.

Yes, Bill McKibben, Yes.

Bill McKibben, an outspoken activist and inspiration author (among other things) has recently written another though-but-more-importantly-action-provoking post over at Grist. Check it out. He says:

Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we've got. It's not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we're going to have to raise our voices.

I recently read the book he mentions writing in 1989, called The End of Nature. It was scary and depressing, and what's worse, it was written 20 years ago and a lot of the issues are still around, as prevalent as ever. It led me to scrawl across my notebook:

HOW CAN PEOPLE NOT SEE THIS GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS AS THE BIGGEST ISSUE OF OUR TIME?

I'll share what I thought were a couple pivotal quotes, if you don't have the time to read the whole thing.
His premise is, I think encapsulated in this particular sentence:

"The invention of nuclear weapons may actually have marked the beginning of the end of nature: we possessed, finally, the capacity to overmaster nature, to leave an indelible imprint everywhere all at once."

To elaborate:

"If the waves crash up against the beach, eroding dunes and destroying homes, it is not the awesome power of Mother Nature. It is the awesome power of man, who has overpowered in a century the processes that have been slowly evolving and changing of their own accord since the earth was born."

And another:

"We live, all of a sudden, in an astroturf world, and though an astroturf world may have a God, he can't speak through the grass, or even be slient through it and let us hear."

I think this last one hits particularly home for anyone who is remotely spiritual. If your spirituality is even loosely connected with God as life, God as unity, or if there is any Nature in your God, it's a point worth considering.

To deal with guilt, we must take responsibility. We Americans alone are responsible for a huge percentage of global environmental harm (which continues as you read). Knowing this, as many do, we must address it. We must strive as individuals to use less energy, to produce less waste, and to educate our friends and family how (and why) to do these things as well. As consumers, we must demand better products, electric cars, organic foods, local products, sweat-free clothes. We must lead by example and show the world we recognize what we've done, take responsibility for it, and as a nation provide a better way of life as an example for the world.

We must reject products that lie about being "environmentally friendly," and seek to create criteria of our own for how we should treat our environment. What, by the way, is your "environment?" Have you thought about this? Is it something you're intimately familiar with or just catch a glimpse of on your commute? How does Organic Ranch Dressing help our environment?

We must become environmentally-informed consumers, and choose products wisely, not based on ads or alluring packaging.

We must examine and change our habits.

Oh, and I'm tired of this mediocre, middle-of-the-road, compromising bullshit. Let's get mad, let's get radical, and let's get some shit done. Right on Bill.

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

I read this today for the first time:
"I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."
I love this!

It reminds me of another Neruda morsel I have written in my room:
Eres para mi suculenta | You are for me succulent
como una panaderia | like a bakery.             

Here's the full poem including the title quote:

Every Day You Play

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Cling to me as though you were frightened.
Even so, at one time a strange shadow ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Pablo Neruda

Go outside!

Awesome website to find outdoor events and spaces around you: http://www.nwf.org/naturefind/

Go outside and stop reading!

Soneto XVII

This is one of my favorite poems. I have a thing for sonnets, probably because they're ridiculously romantic. I still would like to consider myself one of those too, hopeless or not. Anyway, without further ado, here is the original Spanish and translated English versions of Pablo Neruda's Sonnet 27.

Soneto XVII
No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.
Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.
Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,
sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

~

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Leo Kottke: Rings

One of my favorite songs!