Living by the Word Read online

  These are some of the ancestors we have been encouraged to avoid, not to praise, not to know. This alone tells us much. In the America we are building, they laid many a foundation. In the America that will be, they have an honored place.

  1984

  * Your Most Humble Servant by Shirley Graham (New York: Julian Messner, 1949).

  JOURNAL

  Ubud, Bali

  February 12,1987

  Another rainy night. I am in bed, where I’ve been for several hours, after a long walk through Ubud to the monkey forest and then for lunch at the Lotus Cafe—entirely inhabited by Europeans and Americans and one stray very dark and pretty Indian girl in a vivid red dress. Then the walk home, stopping in a local shop—where the woman proprietor is sweet and sells wonderful flowing cool and colorful pants. (Rebecca, on seeing them hanging near the street, immediately exclaimed, “Miss Celie’s pants!”) Anyway, the pants I liked, knee length, with the flowing grace of a sarong, she no longer had, but she urged me to try a kind of flowered jumpsuit, very long—before she showed me how to adjust it to my shape—and Western-influenced Balinese. It looked great, so I bought it.

  But the rain threatens to get me down. In the mornings there is a little sun—nothing direct; in the afternoons there are quite heavy showers, which, even if they are warm and we can walk right through them, I find a little overwhelming after the third or fourth day. Also feeling down because I’ve drunk so much beer, since the water is considered unsafe except here at the house. And, Robert says, this is the week before my period!

  Anyway, very out of sorts, for me. It’s true I overheard the housekeeper (who travels everywhere with an umbrella against rain and sun) tell Rebecca she “don’t like black,” as Rebecca was saying how much she wants to “brown”; and I resent always being perceived as just another “rich” American tourist and importuned to buy at every turn when we are walking and even here at the house. But Ubud is beautiful! I’ve never seen anything like it. The green rice paddies, the soft bluish-gray skies, the people who’ve created the landscape, and themselves, graceful, friendly, amazingly mellow.

  So much so it is a shock to realize that as recently as 1965 more than 100,000 of them killed each other after an attempted Communist coup in Jakarta.

  Bali makes me think of Uganda. The same gentle countryside and gentle people; the same massacres and blood baths.

  Robert wondered aloud why you don’t see middle-aged people, only the young and the old. A lot of them would have been among the 100,000.

  I have many bites! The ones on my feet are especially maddening. In my gloomier moments this morning I thought: If it’s going to rain all the time and I have to suffer mosquitoes as well, I might as well be in Mendocino. (Not knowing that Northern California was experiencing the worst flooding in thirty years!) I felt very homesick, which Rebecca found astonishing. She has taken to Bali—the people, the landscape, the food— like the trouper she is. She is one of those old, old transparent souls the Universe radiates through without impediment, and so, wherever we go, within a week everyone seems aware of her presence. She walks in the rain as if it is sun.

  Have been reading Dancing in the Light, by Shirley MacLaine; much of it is true, as I have experienced life, and a lot is straight Edgar Cayce. But it is sad to see her spirituality limited by her racialism. Indians and Africans have a hard time; especially Africans who, in one of her incarnations, frustrate her because they’re not as advanced as she is! It is amusing to contemplate what the Africans must have thought of her.

  But I don’t care about any of this. In the kitchen, Ketut is making dinner, chicken satay. Rebecca and Robert are at a fire dance, to which I declined to go—pleading aching joints, footwear erosion, and mildew of the brain. The rain is coming down in torrents. Lightning is flashing. The house we’ve rented is spectacular: it faces a terraced hillside of rice paddies, two waterfalls, and coconut trees, and is built in Balinese style but is huge by Balinese standards, I think. Two large bedrooms downstairs and an open-air one upstairs, with another great wooden hand-carved antique Balinese bed at one end. The roof is thickly thatched.

  Two days ago I celebrated my forty-second birthday here, with the two people I love most in the world; we talked about my visit, before we left home, to a very beautiful Indian woman guru, who spoke of the condition of “judness.” A time of spiritual inertia, of feeling thick, heavy, devoid of light. Yet a good time, too, because, well, judness, too, is a part of life; and it is life itself that is good and holy. Not just the “dancing” times. Nor even the light.

  Thinking of this, hoping my loved ones are dry, and smelling dinner, I look up straight into the eye of a giant red hibiscus flower Ketut just placed—with a pat on my head—by the bed. It says: just be, Alice. Being is sufficient. Being is All. The cheerful, sunny self you are missing will return, as it always does, but only being will bring it back.

  NOT ONLY WILL YOUR TEACHERS APPEAR, THEY WILL COOK NEW FOODS FOR YOU

  My friends John and Eleanor founded the Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company a few years ago. They make their living harvesting seaweed—primarily nori, dulse, wakame, and sea-palm frond—on the Mendocino coast at Elk beach, a small sheltered cove where a river meets the ocean, much loved by the locals, who not infrequently do sun and moon worship there. Large fires, lots of children, much to eat, and much gazing into the awesome heavens going “um” and (yes, still) “far out.”

  When I first came to this area in the hills north of San Francisco, a friendly potter, from whom I bought dishes (now my friend Jan Wax), gave a party to which she invited all the people she knew whom she thought I’d like to meet. Among them were Eleanor and John, who, because it was potluck, brought their various concoctions of cooked and raw seaweed.

  I tried hard to stay glued to the lasagne—which for a Southern-born person is exotic enough, but—

  Try this, said Eleanor, offering a forkful of something that looked like chips of fried garbage bag.

  Have a bit of that, said John, proffering something that didn’t look any better.

  Soon I was in the same fix I had found myself in when another new friend, at a similar gathering, pressed a fat wad of pig’s-liver pâté into my hand while telling me in detail how she slaughtered the pig herself. Where are the bushes around this house? I’d wondered in panic, hastily muttering something about needing to go out and look at the stars, and attempting to chew.

  The seaweed was awful, I thought. I didn’t care how many minerals it had; besides, how positively gross that you could taste every one.

  Excellent protein, said Eleanor.

  No fat, said John.

  All the trace elements your body’s starved for, said my friend Jan, and a great cleanser of toxins (including nuclear) from the system. She gamely stuck a minuscule slice of something that looked unspeakable in her mouth.

  I chewed on. It was kind of a cross between well-salted plastic or rubber and fish.

  Have some of the soup, said Eleanor.

  Try this dulse broth, said John.

  They both had that soft-edged, gracefully aging hippie look that, unfortunately, evokes trust.

  I didn’t like the soup.

  To hell, I thought, with the broth.

  Over the months, at different potluck dinners, I sampled and nibbled the products of the Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company—“Grown Wild by the Pacific Ocean!” said their bags. Mainly I learned to hide when the deep-fried sea vegetable platter passed by.

  But then, after about a year, two things happened.

  One day Eleanor gave me a copy of their new sea vegetable cookbook* and at the same time cooked a new creation of hers called Navarro (after our small village, pop. 67) Oysters—because the seaweed, nori, in this instance, is rolled in beaten egg, whole-wheat flour, onion, and soy sauce, and looks and tastes something like oysters when it’s cooked. Only, to my amazement, it tasted much better.

  She cooked a bunch of “oysters” and served them over rice; we ate them with chop
sticks. I ate more than anyone—in fact, every cell in my body seemed to wake up at the taste of this new treat, and after finishing the meal I experienced the most intense food satisfaction and well being that I’d ever had in my life.

  During the coming ice age, which is probably already starting, people will need to get most of their vegetables from the sea, said John.

  For the first time, this did not seem half bad.

  They showed me the drying racks for the seaweed on a sunny hill behind their house, then gave me a large plastic garbage bag full of nori from the giant stash they kept in their bedroom prior to marketing. It was clear I was capable of becoming a nori freak.

  For a summer my friend Robert and I ate Navarro Oysters several times a week. So did our guests. “Ummm,” some said appreciatively. “Yuck! Where are the greens and corn bread?” muttered a few. But all were definitely up for this new experience.

  And then one day John and Eleanor invited us to go harvesting with them. We left for the beach before sunup. When we arrived, the tide was out. We clambered over the rocks, marveling at the beauty of the seaweed; its shimmery iridescence as the sun revealed its purples, greens, browns, yellows, and blues. We picked and we picked, always careful to leave enough to grow. Bags of seaweed. Then we explored the rocks beyond the beach, where I promptly slipped and fell, over my head, into the water. Then we lay in the sun to dry, thankful for the ocean’s generosity, its cleanliness, and its peace.

  Now the U.S. government is planning to lease Mendocino offshore drilling rights to the oil companies, although oil drilling will tar the beach, pollute the air, and contaminate and possibly kill marine creatures and seaweed. John and Eleanor’s livelihood is threatened. Many of the people who live here and love the ocean are heartsick and outraged. Petitions against drilling are flying thick and fast, John and Eleanor generating some of them—with a little help from their friends, who remember their teachings:

  If you eat more sea vegetables, you can eat less meat.

  If you eat less meat, farmers can grow more grains and beans.

  Everyone knows if we eat mainly grains and beans it is easily possible to feed everyone on the planet.

  And there’s always the next ice age to consider.

  I feel as if my very right to grow in new ways that protect and nurture the planet is being threatened by the government’s plan. How cruel, too, eventually to learn a better way of doing something and then be denied the use of it. It is like the reactionary laws our government sometimes enacts that take away freedoms from people—women, gays, people of color, children—that much of the rest of the population has learned to be glad they have, because they understand this ultimately means a richer, freer life for themselves. Freedom, after all, is like love: the more you give to others, the more you have.

  Every small, positive change we can make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future. I am happy to say that, thanks to the persistence of my friends, I have changed about seaweed. From someone who hid behind the hostess when the fried wakame platter went by, I’ve become someone who doesn’t bother to take food to the beach. I can lie on the sand in the sun and eat the dried seaweed straight off the rocks.

  1986

  * Sea Vegetable (gourmet) Cookbook and Forager’s Guide by Eleanor and John Lewallen (Navarro, CA: The Mendocino Sea Vegetable Company, 1983).

  EVERYTHING IS A HUMAN BEING

  [This was written to celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., and delivered as a keynote address at the University of California, Davis, January 15, 1983.]

  …There are people who think that only people have emotions like pride, fear, and joy, but those who know will tell you all things are alive, perhaps not in the same way we are alive, but each in its own way, as should be, for we are not all the same. And though different from us in shape and life span, different in Time and Knowing, yet are trees alive. And rocks. And water. And all know emotion.

  —Anne Cameron, DAUGHTERS OF COPPER WOMAN*

  Some years ago a friend and I walked out into the countryside to listen to what the Earth was saying, and to better hear our own thoughts. We had prepared ourselves to experience what in the old days would have been called a vision, and what today probably has no name that is not found somewhat amusing by many. Because there is no longer countryside that is not owned by someone, we stopped at the entrance to a large park, many miles distant from the city. By the time we had walked a hundred yards, I felt I could go no farther and lay myself down where I was, across the path in a grove of trees. For several hours I lay there, and other people entering the park had to walk around me. But I was hardly aware of them. I was in intense dialogue with the trees.

  As I was lying there, really across their feet, I felt or “heard” with my feelings the distinct request from them that I remove myself. But these are not feet, I thought, peering at them closely, but roots. Roots do not tell you to go away. It was then that I looked up and around me into the “faces.” These “faces” were all middle-aged to old conifers, and they were all suffering from some kind of disease, the most obvious sign of which was a light green fungus, resembling moss and lichen, that nearly covered them, giving them—in spite of the bright spring sunlight—an eerie, fantastical aspect. Beneath this greenish envelopment, the limbs of the trees, the “arms,” were bent in hundreds of shapes in a profusion of deformity. Indeed, the trees reminded me of nothing so much as badly rheumatoid elderly people, as I began to realize how difficult, given their bent shapes, it would be for their limbs to move freely in the breeze. Clearly these were sick people, or trees; irritable, angry, and growing old in pain. And they did not want me lying on their gnarled and no doubt aching feet.

  Looking again at their feet, or roots—which stuck up all over the ground and directly beneath my cheek—I saw that the ground from which they emerged was gray and dead-looking, as if it had been poisoned. Aha, I thought, this is obviously a place where chemicals were dumped. The soil has been poisoned, the trees afflicted, slowly dying, and they do not like it. I hastily communicated this deduction to the trees and asked that they understand it was not I who had done this. I just moved to this part of the country, I said. But they were not appeased. Get up. Go away, they replied. But I refused to move. Nor could I. I needed to make them agree to my innocence.

  The summer before this encounter I lived in the northern hills of California, where much logging is done. Each day on the highway, as I went to buy groceries or to the river to swim, I saw the loggers’ trucks, like enormous hearses, carrying the battered bodies of the old sisters and brothers, as I thought of them, down to the lumberyards in the valley. In fact, this sight, in an otherwise peaceful setting, distressed me—as if I lived in a beautiful neighborhood that daily lost hundreds of its finest members, while I sat mournful but impotent beside the avenue that carried them away.

  It was of this endless funeral procession that I thought as I lay across the feet of the sick old relatives whose “safe” existence in a public park (away from the logging trucks) had not kept them safe at all.

  I love trees, I said.

  Human, please, they replied.

  But I do not cut you down in the prime of life. I do not haul your mutilated and stripped bodies shamelessly down the highway. It is the lumber companies, I said.

  Just go away, said the trees.

  All my life you have meant a lot to me, I said. I love your grace, your dignity, your serenity, your generosity…

  Well, said the trees, before I actually finished this list, we find you without grace, without dignity, without serenity, and there is no generosity in you either—just ask any tree. You butcher us, you burn us, you grow us only to destroy us. Even when we grow ourselves, you kill us, or cut off our limbs. That we are alive and have feelings means nothing to you.

  But I, as an individual, am innocent, I said. Though it did occur to me that I live in a wood house, I eat on a wood table, I sleep on a wood bed.

  My uses of wood are modest, I
said, and always tailored to my needs. I do not slash through whole forests, destroying hundreds of trees in the process of “harvesting” a few.

  But finally, after much discourse, I understood what the trees were telling me: Being an individual doesn’t matter. Just as human beings perceive all trees as one (didn’t a U.S. official say recently that “when you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen ’em all”?), all human beings, to the trees, are one. We are judged by our worst collective behavior, since it is so vast; not by our singular best. The Earth holds us responsible for our crimes against it, not as individuals, but as a species—this was the message of the trees. I found it to be a terrifying thought. For I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions—those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.

  And how hard it will be to change our worst behavior!

  Last spring I moved even deeper into the country, and went eagerly up the hill from my cabin to start a new garden. As I was patting the soil around the root of a new tomato plant, I awakened a small garden snake who lived in the tomato bed. Though panicked and not knowing at the time what kind of snake it was, I tried calmly to direct it out of the garden, now that I, a human being, had arrived to take possession of it. It went. The next day, however, because the tomato bed was its home, the snake came back. Once more I directed it away. The third time it came back, I called a friend—who thought I was badly frightened, from my nervous behavior—and he killed it. It looked very small and harmless, hanging from the end of his hoe.

  Everything I was ever taught about snakes—that they are dangerous, frightful, repulsive, sinister—went into the murder of this snake person, who was only, after all, trying to remain in his or her home, perhaps the only home he or she had ever known. Even my ladylike “nervousness” in its presence was learned behavior. I knew at once that killing the snake was not the first act that should have occurred in my new garden, and I grieved that I had apparently learned nothing, as a human being, since the days of Adam and Eve.