A Wednesday Rant: A whisper of what we have forgotten

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/70

“I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

The Negro Speaks of Rivers By Langston Hughes

I want to invite you to close your eyes, take a nice slow easy breath, squint your memory, and conjure up the image of a river you know and love.

There must be a river in your life.

For fourteen years I lived
near the mighty Niagara River,
breathed its mist, felt its heartbeat.
From sea level to the bottom of the falls
it is a pounding artery cutting through stone
so blue, so compelling
in its headlong rush toward
violence.

Langston Hughes wrote, “A Negro Speaks of Rivers” in 1920, the summer after he graduated from high school. He was on a train crossing the Big Muddy on his way to visit his father in Mexico.

The sun was setting on the Mississippi,
its orange tang reflected in slow brown water
as the train rocked to and fro
and called its mournful cry into the dusk.
It was then that the river’s big face
reached up
and in its pooled eyes
revealed to young Langston,
the history of his people.

The river itself spoke as a witness
to the misery of slaves
and the inhumanity of slave owners
and of Abe Lincoln’s taking a raft down to New Orleans
like Huck Finn, and how he saw for the first time
human beings bought and sold
and bleeding from their chains;
and how, Lincoln would later say,
the images never left him.
And so Hughes wrote,
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

I’ve known rivers too.

The White River running through my hometown
that flooded every spring
and we helped stack sandbags
until the year they built real levies.
The White River looks and smells like home.

The Mississinewa,
that dirty little river
that runs as fast in spring
as it runs slow like a clogged drain at the end of summer.
I knew its fish
and nests of water snakes,
and those ugly prehistoric gars
swimming in its dark water.
The Mississinewa looks and feels like
a steamy August afternoon
when nothing moves in Indiana
that doesn’t absolutely have to.

I’ve known farms and farmers;
grew up surrounded by them.
As a boy I measured myself in
the tire ruts of Massie Ferguson tractors, and
chased piglets in the spring mud.
As a teenager I compared my strength to others
as we fell rotted trees taller than a steeple
and split every last log into fireplace splinters.

Farmers had an aura, something between
the grim silence of a judge
and the heroic silhouette of a Fire Fighter.
They were the ones that knew everything
but who spoke little
and they did exotic things like chew and spit.
Farms and farmers smelled
like the Earth,
a solid outcropping of human strength.

I’ve known moons.
Lonely moons when I was desperate for company,
in anguish without someone for whom I swooned;
Moons in the west
behind the Grand Tetons
or casting shadows over the Badlands;
A moon over Ohio
so massive and so low
it might have nudged the earth.
I have known moons so pale as to have the flu;
moons that warmed the heart
even when breath was steam in my face;
moons so placid in the midst of a storm
that it whispered peace for the mind.

I once performed an outdoor wedding under a blue moon and afterward we ate Moon Pies.

I could go on like this for quite some time because thinking about strokes my soul like the memory of a childhood lullaby. Our relationship to earth is more than molecules, more than biology, more than ecology; it is history and memory and the personal projection of our own internal lives onto the world of living things all around us.

We live as if earth is subservient to us when it is we who are buried by the earth.

Ours is a spiritual relationship with earth and those of us who live in cities, which are most of us these days, are always in danger of drifting away from that relationship. Even those of us who live more remotely, completely surrounded by the colors and sounds and topography of landscape constructed over eons rather than sculpted by humans, are in danger of drifting away from our relationship with it the way residents of NYC forget about the sites everyone else comes to see.

We are always in danger of forgetting, growing distant, becoming disconnected, turning deaf and blind and mute when it comes to loving and being loved by the earth. Yet there is no such thing as spirituality apart from earth. Anything called “spiritual” without roots in the soil is a lie, and likely propaganda.

We are of the earth – ashes to ashes and dust to dust. If we yearn to be more deeply spiritual then it is to earth we must turn.

The challenge to re-enter our earth-bound natures will be different for each of us depending upon where we live, what we have access to, and even our personality type. But whoever we are and wherever we live, we need to allow the Earth to speak to us; to whisper of what we have forgotten.