Heart Broken

Photo Credit: Corin Royal Drummond

                                                             

 

        The photo you see is of Strawberry Canyon. I have hiked this canyon in every season, listened to the creek in winter, and the birds in summer . I swear I saw the native Alamed whipsnake once, but, full confession,  I've also sworn that I heard the voices of the tribes who once fished here, so you may not believe me on either count. I have never seen a fox or mountain lion, but I'm told that both live in the higher canyon, and I have had a staring contest with more than one doe. 
      Today I received word that 22, 000 trees are to be cut in Strawberry Canyon by FEMA, in accord with the university - and sixty some thousand more in an Oakland canyon. I am heartbroken. If I tried to describe my sadness, the page would go black, and can't have that happen because 1) I have taken it upon myself since last year to speak for the trees and 2) I really want you to read this article. Please. And act if you are moved to do so. 
                       

FEMA Plans Clear-Cutting 85,000 Berkeley and Oakland Trees

Posted on 16 May 2013

By Randy Shaw
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is moving to chop down 22,000 trees in Berkeley's historic Strawberry and Claremont Canyons and over 60,000 more in Oakland. This destructive plan is rapidly moving forward with little publicity, and FEMA cleverly scheduled its three public meetings for mid and late May while UC Berkeley students were in finals or gone for the summer.
UC Berkeley has applied for the grant to destroy the bucolic Strawberry and Claremont Canyon areas, claiming that the trees pose a fire hazard. The school has no plans to replant, and instead will cover 20% of the area in wood chips two feet deep. And it will pour between 700 and 1400 gallons of herbicide to prevent re-sprouting, including the highly toxic herbicide, Roundup. People are mobilizing against this outrageous proposal, which UC Berkeley has done its best to keep secret.
    When I heard this week that the federal government would be funding the clear-cutting of 85,000 beautiful Berkeley and Oakland trees, including 22,000 in historic Strawberry and Claremont Canyon, my initial reaction was disbelief. I then wondered how the feds have money for this destructive project while Head Start and public housing programs are being cut due to the sequester.
The trees in Strawberry and Claremont Canyon have been there for decades and hardly constitute a "hazard." But pouring 1400 gallons of herbicide on the currently pristine hills will create a real hazard, and UC Berkeley even plans to use the highly toxic herbicide "Roundup" to squelch the return of non-native vegetation.
This is a true horror story that will happen absent public opposition. I know that many will find it hard to believe that this could occur in the pro-environment San Francisco Bay Area, but UC Berkeley may be counting on this attitude to get all the approvals they need before people find out the truth.
Please read "Death of a Million Trees," which provides all of the facts, figures and background about the Strawberry and Claremont Canyon proposed clear cutting as well as the tree destruction plans for the East Bay. The last public hearing will be held Saturday, May 18, 2013, 10 AM - 12 PM, at Claremont Middle School, 5750 College Avenue in Oakland.
The public has until June 17 to submit written comments on the project. You can do so through the East Bay Hills hazardous fire risk reduction project website, or via email.
There are countless destructive attacks on the environment that Bay Area activists cannot impact. But this is occurring in our own backyard, and activists must make sure that this cannot happen here.

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Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu

Oakland Museum of California  March 16 - June 30

September 2001, Oakland Museum of California

                                                          
 "I feel like I'm using my painting as a memorial garden."
         
         I started to write “The theme of Hung Liu’s work is...” - when I realized that the word “theme” is totally inadequate. It reminds me of essays for English classes, not the lifelong work of a woman whose goal is the resurrection of the dispossessed.
         So many of the peoples of the world experience deprivation and exile. The artist or writer may reinstate them in their old world, describe their suffering, or reshape their identity. It’s one part excavation, one part re-creation. 
      
        Though she left China and came to study and live in California  in 1982, most of Hung Liu’s dispossessed are, not surprisingly, Chinese. She researched archives to find photos of those who are not even a footnote to history.  Peasant laborers (without the smiles of socialist realism), women soldiers (without the muscles and heroic stance of Maoist art), the poor, the grieving elderly, the 'comfort women' used by Japanese troops during WW II, prostitutes, the exiled, war refugees. 
                       
       “In terms of true inspiration you need to discover, to excavate, to peel off the layers and try to find out what was there that got lost, for there is always something missing.”
   Summoning Ghosts: the Art of Hung Liu, University of California Press, 2012, P. 101
 
         Hung Liu found photos of young prostitutes. Those photos of anonymous teen-age girls were used as advertisements during the end of the last dynasty. She rescues them from obscurity by painting their portraits with great affinity and affection, and lends them a friendly cow, her symbol of humanity, for companionship.
       

The Cow and the Girls, 2007 Artnet

        Millions of Chinese were displaced by war and government policy during the twentieth century, and Hung Liu's work focuses, as always, on the human element. I found the painting By the Rivers of Babylon, a portrait of an exiled family, particularly moving. I’ve known the psalm that begins with those words since I was a child:
    “If I forget you, O Jerusalem , let my right hand wither; Let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you,
     if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.”

       There are so many Jerusalems! So many who have fled ancestral lands, been forced out of homes.

By the Rivers of Babylon, 2000, Artnet

         Hung Liu’s work, however painful her choice of subjects, is beautiful and lush. The painted surface is as multi-layered as life itself,  and the measured, deliberate dripping of paint adds another dimension, another texture. Look closely at By the Rivers of Babylon. Children are eating from colorful Ming dynasty bowls! 


       That imaginal juxtaposition appears in so many of her paintings. A young girl, bent over with heavy burdens, is surrounded by doves, fantastic bird wings, and painted Buddhas. Cranes and blossoms and butterflies surround whores and wounded warriors. It is not prettifying, but a loving adornment of the dispossessed. She holds the opposites: the heron in elegant plumage or the inevitable blossoms of  Chinese art - juxtaposed with poverty and displacement. 
    
        I was so moved by a series of simple paintings. I wish I had photos for you. Each day the artist painted some object in her mother’s home during the 49 days of mourning after the elderly woman's death. She painted useful objects, like the kitchen tools her mother used every day, each object made eloquent. Hung Liu is a woman who understands the need for ceremony, but she invents rituals for her own soul’s particular journey. 

         And then come the paintings of a flame, one after another. The spirit kept alive. The soul guided by light on its journey. An ancient impulse to light a candle to accompany grief.  One painting, one candle, after another.
    





                                 

Myanmar: Version 2 - Poetics

Sign in Pindaya Temple

        










     


         Morning on the river.  Fog-lift and fishing boats. She steers, he hauls the net. Or the solitude of a man alone in a boat all day, every day the same until the sand runs out.  
      All native boats speak grace as their mother     tongue.
     
       
       That lovely yellow ginger flower! Why is it called The Weeping Goldsmith? It is said that the goldsmiths were reduced to tears since none of their creations could rival its exquisite form. The American botanist who “discovered” the flower on a remote patch of land realized, as I did, that Weeping Goldsmith (Pa deign no) is sold in all the flower stalls near the temples, so ‘exquisite’ can take its place next to the Buddha.  

      The tattooed woman with the feathered flicker keeps the crows away from the offerings of fruit.
   


     At Kyaikmaraw many of the Buddhas are at eye level, and their gaze meets yours.  You are their goal, since they have already gained heaven.   

Photo by Bill Fulton

      
       
      The boat crosses Inle Lake past tomatoes grown on floating islands. Bamboo poles fasten the islands to the lake bottom like straight pins in fabric. You could remove the pins and tow the island anywhere in the lake. 

      Egret on an islet of water hyacinth. Traveling like this, on the move, you keep saying goodbye to beauty.

      In Pagan, a girl gets the custodian to open the Temple of the 37 Nats (spirits & supernaturals) for us,  then she walks me down the  line of sculptures explaining each one, laughing at the whiskey-drinking spirit who races horses. And there’s Durga,  black garbed, scarved and shawled, riding her tiger, a migrant worker-goddess from Hinduism, who I last encountered in a cave in India.  

  








      

       
      

      Humans circumnavigate the stupa clockwise, but the birds circle to the right, going against the clock. Is that the secret of flight?   

      Morning.  Climbing the Tower. Temples in all directions as far as you can see. Tearjoy. Temples scattered across the plain like Buddhaseeds flowering into gold stupas.  
Who can take in the vastness of the past? 

Photo by Bill Fulton

          









    

      

Myanmar: Version One

Leg-rowing fisherman on Inle Lake (Leah Shelleda)

      What strange people we are! Absorbed with the latest technology, then flying off great distances to see folks living traditional lives.

      I have yearned for ancient ways and lives that are sustained not by wealth and toys, but a love for the earth. This yearning has been tempered by all the subsistence-based villages I have visited or lived in, where people have barely enough to eat and suffer from ill-health.
       

Photo by Bill Fulton

     But the village in Mon State was different. It was along the Thanlwin (not a typo) river, and we reached it by boat. The wood and bamboo houses had strong roofs to protect against sun and monsoon, and were well-maintained. 

(Paste made from the Thanaka tree is used to decorate faces)  

The market was filled with the many fruits and vegetables they grow plus several varieties of rice and fish. The children were bright eyed and healthy and the women didn't look look 20 years older than their age.                         

The reason? A surplus, which provided for a full-time school, medicine and a few trucks. The source? A "sawmill" for cabinet and boat builders who used traditional techniques, and relied on a variety of different tree species to make a beautiful product. The "sawmill" consisted of a  belt-driven circular saw we estimated to be 50 years old, and an ingenious system of pulleys. I doubt that they were paid sufficiently for their labor, the people were still relatively poor by Western standards, but the village was self -sufficient and thriving, and impacted lightly on the surrounding environment.                                                                     

Photo by Bill Fulton

         We thought a lot about choice on this trip. What if the children in the village wanted to be doctors or teachers in their kleptocracy of a country?  Would any ever have the opportunity to travel, as we do? Surely you couldn't blame any young person in Myanmar for wanting to leave the country and join the the well fed and stylish world they see on TV. All they want is opportunity.  

      Let me tell you about Poppie, who we met in Kiang Tong. He had studied physics, loved science, but where was there a lab for him to do research, or a teaching position? 

Photo by Bill Fulton

He supports his family selling ice cream in summer and working in the tourist industry in the winter. He has wonderful enthusiasm and what we came to call RBS - Remarkable Burmese Sweetness. Poppie took tourists to see the Akha tribeswomen in their extraordinary silver clad bonnets or trekking to the longhouse of the Loi people.Younger women were beginning to dress in tee shirt or blouse and longyi (sarong) like most Burmese, and what would happen to his business if tourists couldn't photograph colorful villagers? And then there was the shivering and sweating of his chronic malaria, the expensive drugs, and a government totally unconcerned with providing cheap mosquito netting, at least for the little ones.

    Is choice a developed world luxury we  overestimate? Are we lulled into a pleasurable stupor by the innumerable brands available to us, equating freedom with all we can buy? 

 

Thanks to Canal One - "Too Many Logos"

    There are different kinds of hunger. In the 1970s emigration was allowed from the Soviet Union, and many came to the Bay Area where I live. We talked about the 'babushka ladies' who came to the supermarkets and slowly walked the aisles just looking - women who had once waited in line outside a store that was rumored to have bread or beets that day.  

Thanks to geardiary.com

And here was abundance: bins of fresh vegetables even in winter, whole aisles of every variety of bread, cracker or cookies, steaks and chops and poultry piled in freezers.                    
 
      Were the women walking those aisles with the wonder that Bill and I experienced in the Shwedagon, the main temple of Yangon? Our hunger for ancient beauty and spirit was fulfilled as we walked through the temple. We realized that families and friends gathered on the vast marble promenade as though it was a park or a public square, or the marketplace. It is not a place of hushed reverence. Laughter was as present as chanting,  and as frequent as prayer. The glorious temple was a staple of their lives.

Photo by Bill Fulton

         I've been thinking of all those who have come to the U.S. 
        and Europe to feed their families, and of all the Americans 
             and Europeans who travel to South East Asia, flying
                     thousands of miles to feed their souls.
                                     
   



  
      






 




        

   

     

Speaking Journese

Bagan, Myanmar  photo by David Haberlah

                                                        
      I am so struck by the different journeys the people I love are on.  Some are on the scary path that runs from healer to healer and clinic to hospital.  Another is traveling to be with his companion, whose life may be ending soon.  A family member has a new and special client. My beloved niece has announced her engagement.  A newborn smiled for the first time. All these ages and different stages. It’s such an adventure this life, and Monday Bill & I will have the great good fortune to travel to Burma.  But I want to tell you about today.

      Sometimes, remarkably,  the personal, spiritual, political and historical roads all come together, as they did this morning. I'll start with the historical, going back to the year 1954. The Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board, declared that the state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.
    
       In 1954, Martin Luther King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was already 
a member of the executive committee of  the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and about to intensify his political activity.

      And the spiritual? This morning a woman completed a journey. In 1954 the Board of the reform Jewish temple her parents belonged to voted against allowing women to read from the Torah (first 5 books of the Hebrew bible).  It was the rabbi’s desire to allow girls the same rite of passage that their fathers and brothers celebrated, but he was the only one who voted for it. Today this woman, a professional in her 50s, retiring president of the Board of her synagogue, celebrated her Bat Mitzvah.

      Exactly 100 years ago, the woman’s grandfather had celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, and she was reading the same excerpts from Torah that he had - a portion of the story of Exodus, the flight from Egypt.

      Synchronically, this is also the weekend we celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday, so after the Torah reading, the singers and musicians temporarily abandoned the Hebrew liturgy, and played and sang the verses of the gospel hymn Go Down, Moses. We all joined in the chorus "with great gladness."
     
       Such a moving and joyous occasion, for me personally. During the silent meditation, the words “blessed is the one who brings compassion to all creatures” came to mind. I realized that, of course, the words could speak for both the Jewish Shekinah, the divine feminine, and the Buddha whose temples and monasteries Bill & I were about to visit.  And then I saw, as if she were directly in front of me, the Shekinah bring her palms together and raise them in ‘namaste’, the gesture of peace.