Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  I Can Worship You

  I Can Worship You

  The Love of Bodies

  All the Toys

  Poem for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday

  The Same as Gold

  My Friend Calls

  My Friend Calls

  Coming Back from Seeing Your People

  Someone I Barely Know

  Despite the Hunger

  My African

  How Different You Are

  New House Moves

  New House Moves

  Trapdoors to the Cellar Spring-Grass Green

  Whiter Than Bone

  Even When I Walked Away - i

  Red Petals Sticking Out - ii

  Inside My Rooms - iii

  Let Change Play God

  Refrigerator Poems

  i

  ii

  iii

  Just at Dusk

  The Moment I Saw Her

  A Native Person Looks up from the Plate

  The Anonymous Caller

  I Was So Puzzled by the Attacks

  At First, It Is True, I Thought There Were Only Peaches & Wild Grapes

  May 23, 1999

  Reverend E. in Her Red Dress

  All the People Who Work for Me & My Dog Too

  All the People Who Work for Me & My Dog Too

  The Snail Is My Power Animal

  In Everything I Do

  The Writer’s Life

  Grace

  Loss of Vitality

  Until I Was Nearly Fifty

  Thanks for the Garlic

  Thanks for the Garlic

  The New Man

  What Will Save Us

  My Friend Arrived

  Dead Men Love War

  Dead Men Love War

  Thousands of Feet Below You

  Living off of Isolated Women

  They Made Love

  To Be a Woman

  To Be a Woman

  Thanksgiving

  The Last Time I Left Our House

  I Loved You So Much

  Winning

  Falling Bodies

  Falling Bodies

  Why the War You Have in Mind (Yours and Mine) Is Obsolete

  Projection

  When You Look

  The Tree

  The Tree

  The Climate of the Southern Hemisphere

  Where Is That Nail File? Where Are My Glasses? Have You Seen My Car Keys?

  My Ancestors’ Earnings

  My Ancestors’ Earnings

  My Friend Yeshi

  Ancestors to Alice

  One of the Traps

  Not Children

  Not Children

  You Can Talk

  Goddess

  Why War Is Never a Good Idea

  The Award

  The Award

  Though We May Feel Alone

  When We Let Spirit Lead Us

  Dream

  We Are All So Busy

  The Backyard, Careyes

  The Backyard, Careyes

  Practice

  Dreaming the New World in Careyes

  Patriot

  Because Light Is Attracted to Dark

  When Fidel Comes to Visit Me

  When Fidel Comes to Visit Me

  No Better Life

  Someone Should Have Taught You This

  Dream of Frida Kahlo

  My Mother Was So Wonderful

  Aging

  Aging

  Some Things to Enjoy About Aging

  Lying Quietly

  Wrinkles

  Life Is Never Over

  Bring Me the Heart of María Sabina

  If They Come to Shoot You

  You Too Can Look, Smell, Dress, Act This Way

  The Breath of the Feminine

  Relying on neither ...

  Bring Me the Heart of María Sabina

  About the Author

  Also by Alice Walker

  Copyright Page

  Para “El Chinito” Guillermo, and to the blessed Feminine in us all

  Let’s admit it. We women are building a motherland; each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land, a resurrected land come back from the dead. Mundo de la madre, psychic motherworld, coexisting and coequal with all other worlds. This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.

  —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

  Preface

  Most of these poems were written at Casa Madre, our ochre red house, my daughter’s and mine, on the central coast in Mexico. I had moved out of the large white room with veranda looking toward the Pacific and into what is usually a guest bedroom. Smaller, darker, quieter; less yang, far, far more yin. It was shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon; I was feeling a deep sadness about the events and an incredible weariness that once again whatever questions had been raised were to be answered by war. Each morning, after sitting for half an hour, I wrote several poems. This was something of a surprise, since I had spent the past couple of years telling my friends I would probably not be writing anything more. What will you do instead? one of them asked. I would like to become a wandering inspiration, I replied. I had an image of myself showing up wherever people gathered to express their determination to have a future or to celebrate the present, speaking, reading, playing one of my very simple musical instruments, and just being around. I did not think I needed to offer much more than this. I still don’t. It is the best that I have and the easiest to give. Still, obviously, life had more writing for me in mind—if poems can actually be called writing. I have now written and published six volumes of poetry since my first collection, written while I was a student and published in 1968. From that first volume to this, what remains the same is the sense that, unlike “writing,” poetry chooses when it will be expressed, how it will be expressed, and under what circumstances. Its requirements for existence remain mysterious. In its spontaneous, bare truthfulness, it bears a close relation to song and to prayer. I once told someone I could not have written my novel The Temple of My Familiar with straightened hair. I could not have written these poems in a bright sunny room where there were no shadows.

  What many North Americans lost on September 11 is a self-centered innocence that had long grated on the nerves of the rest of the world. With time, more of this innocence will be shed, and this is not a bad thing. With compassion for our ignorance, we might still learn to feel our way among and through shockingly unfamiliar and unexpected shadows. To discover and endure a time of sorrow, yes, but also of determination to survive and thrive, of inspiration and of poems. The adventures one encounters will, of necessity, have a more risk-filled depth.

  In my mid-fifties I devoted a year to the study of plant allies, seeking to understand their wisdom and to avail myself of the aid to insightful living that I believe the earth provides as surely as do meditation centers. I also wished to understand the ease with which so many in our Western culture become addicted: to drugs, to food, to sex, to thinness. What are we lacking that we so predictably can be sold all manner of harmful material in an effort to make up for it? I was particularly interested in discovering what our children are seeking when they turn to drugs and alcohol. Three times during the year I gathered in a circle with other women and a shaman
and her assistant and drank ayuascha, a healing medicine used for thousands of years by the indigenous peoples of our hemisphere. Ayuascha is known as “the vine of the soul” and is considered holy. With this assessment I completely agree; I remain awed by my experiences. Several times I gathered with both women and men for the eating of mushrooms, called by the people who use them for healing “flesh of the gods.” For my final communication with the spirits of the plant world, at least in this form, I journeyed to the Amazon, home of “Grandmother” Ayuascha, where she herself instructed me I need look no further in her mirror; what she’d shown me already was enough.

  As I see it, this is the work of the apprentice elder: to travel to those realms from which might come new (or ancient) visions of how humans might live peacefully and more lovingly upon the earth. I learned a lot, some of it fairly obvious. Our children take addictive drugs partly to allay their fears about what begins to look like a severely compromised future, one filled with hatred and with war. They take drugs to feel less lonely in a world that consistently chooses “profit” over community. But the most fundamental reason they take drugs, many of them, is the desire to have a religious or spiritual or ecstatic and trans-formative experience, a need hardwired into our being. Until relatively recently—the last five hundred years or so—most of our people had rituals during which they used all manner of inebriants to connect them with the divine. No one had invented a system to make money off of making others intoxicated. Nor were there laws forbidding the use of sacred plants used in healing and in ceremony—laws that, in the United States, have had a soul-killing effect on the native peoples whose connection to the infinite for thousands of years centered around the eating of mushrooms and particularly of peyote. I returned to my “ordinary” magical life much changed, and much the same, but deeply respectful of all our ancestors and their great inquisitiveness about, and belief in, the universe around them.

  It was during these travels, internal ones and external ones, that I became aware of María Sabina, whose beloved face appears near the poem that invokes her name. Shaman, healer, priestess of the mushrooms, she was a legend in Mexico even while alive. Today she remains passionately revered, respected, loved, because she dedicated her life to the health and happiness of all humans. Whatever she is smoking will be used to cure whichever patient might be lying before her. She may receive a vision of what the illness is, or she may blow smoke over the sick person, purifying them and everything they touch. A poor Mazatec Indian from the mountains of Oaxaca, she has left a legacy of an amazing freedom, the foundation of which is absolute trust in the goodness of the earth; in its magic, in its love of us humans, in its ever present assistance the moment we give ourselves, unconditionally, into its wonder.

  Woman who thunders am I, woman who sounds am I,

  Spiderwoman am I, hummingbird woman am I,

  Eagle woman am I,

  Whirling woman of the whirlwind am I,

  Woman of a sacred enchanted place am I,

  Woman of the shooting stars am I.

  —María Sabina1

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank Wendy Weil, Kate Medina, and

  Jessica Kirshner for all their thoughtfulness

  and help.

  I Can Worship You

  I Can Worship You

  I can worship

  You

  But I cannot give

  You everything.

  If you cannot

  Adore

  This body.

  If you cannot

  Put your lips

  To my

  Clear water.

  If you cannot

  Rub bellies

  With

  My sun.

  The Love of Bodies

  Dearest One

  Of flesh

  & bone

  There is in

  My memory

  Such a delight

  In the recent feel of your warm body;

  Your flesh, and remembrance of the miracle

  Of bone,

  The structure of

  Your sturdy knee.

  The softness of your belly

  Curves

  My hand;

  Your back

  Warms me.

  Your tush, seen bottomless,

  Is like a small,

  Undefended

  Country

  In which is grown

  Yellow

  Melons.

  It is such a blessing

  To be born

  Into these;

  And what a use

  To put

  Them to.

  To hold,

  To cherish,

  To delight.

  The tree next door

  Is losing

  Its body

  Today. They are cutting

  It down, piece

  By heavy piece

  Returning,

  With a thud,

  To

  The earth.

  May she know peace

  Eternal

  Returning to

  Her source

  And

  That her beauty

  Lofty

  Intimate

  With air

  & fog

  Was seen

  And bowed to

  Until this

  Transition.

  I send love

  And gratitude

  That Life

  Sent you

  (And her)

  To spend

  This time

  With me.

  After the bombing of 9/11, September 25, 2001

  All the Toys

  You have all

  The toys

  & you keep them

  To yourself.

  Every once

  In a while

  Each hundred

  Years

  Or so

  A few of us

  Get a toy or two

  & go skimming about the earth

  Just like

  You do.

  But we feel

  Foolish

  Out there

  In the blue sea

  The crisp

  White boat

  Listing, lost

  For all the world

  To see.

  We drift

  Aimless

  Just

  Like you

  Wondering

  If toys is all

  There is

  To this game

  Still wondering

  As you seem

  To

  With all your

  Toys

  When will our ship

  Come in.

  Poem for Aneta Chapman on Her 33rd Birthday

  It’s you

  Who taught her

  To read

  She says

  With soft eyes

  Telling me

  One

  Of the many reasons

  She cherishes

  You.

  Following her gaze

  Into the past

  I see two

  Small

  Sweet

  Dark hands

  Clasped

  Two hooded

  Tiny heads

  Four

  Ashy little

  Legs

  Bravely crossing

  The wintry

  Streets

  Of Cleveland, Ohio

  Destination:

  Library.

  You pause

  At every corner

  The littler hand

  Secure

  In your scarcely

  Larger one.

  Be careful

  You say

  With gentle

  Emphasis.

  We must wait

  For the green light.

  Aries

  Holding on

  To Cancer:

  The one who

  Leaps upon the world

  Held safe

  By />
  The one

  Who

  Stays home

  To mind

  The hearth.

  Today

  It is

  Still

  Your warm

  Sure hand

  She trusts

  Your shy smile

  That makes

  Her happy

  Your face

  In the largest

  Room

  That

  Makes her

  Feel safe

  Not alone.

  You are the sister

  The big

  Sister

  As hero.

  The one who sees

  The one who listens

  The one who guides

  Teaches

  & protects.

  The one who

  Sacrifices

  The one whose

  Sure reward

  Is love.

  Dear Aneta,

  The world

  Of women

  Would be

  Hopeless

  Without sisters

  Like you.

  We would go

  Hungry

  We would be

  Empty

  We would be

  Cold

  Shaky on our

  Small, unsure legs

  Without

  Big sisters

  Like you.

  Your presence

  In our

  World

  Is like

  The sun

  Warming us.

  Like the

  Blossoming trees

  Feeding us

  With the beauty

  Of your willingness

  To endure

  To love us

  Unconditionally

  To give.

  And so

  On this day

  That you

  Reach the age

  When mystics

  & revolutionaries

  Strike out

  Into the

  Wilderness

  To begin

  Their

  Ministries

  To a broken

  World

  & wise women

  Quietly support

  & champion

  The beloved spirits

  In their midsts

  I salute

  You

  With love

  & appreciation.

  Thank you

  For

  Your patient

  Loving