Asakiyume mita

We went for a walk at Bright Water Bog in Shutesbury, MA, yesterday. It was a misty, moisty, equinoctial day, with ice still present in places.

It was perfect. I do love-love-love places that blur water and land. Best of all? There were cranberries. Enchanting.

Cranberry, lower portion of the photo


( two more photos of two other cranberries, in case, like me, you can't get enough of them )

I saw a few just out of reach and was going to put a foot off the boardwalk and onto a tussock to pick one.

"I don't know if that's solid," Wakanomori said.

So I pressed on it with my hand, and down, down my hand went into that cold water. Not solid! Magic.

Canada geese or maybe otters or moose deliver mail here, I think:


Actually it's a geocache location.... shhhhhhh

This lichen-bespangled pine sapling is enjoying the acidity of the bog.


So much beauty--a mingling world of blurred boundaries.

In The Mountain in the Sea, Ray Nayler made the fact that octopuses were able to write a central part of what indicates they're advanced (a character says, “Yes, they have writing… which is an enormous leap in cultural evolution”)--a hugely ethnocentric notion.

So it's very affirming to read Natalia Brizuela's introduction to another brief collection of essays by the Indigenous Brazilian activist Ailton Krenak. (The collection is called Life Is Not Useful.) She writes:

Yasnaya Aguilar, the Mixé linguist, writer, and activist, reminds us ... that Indigenous people do not have “oral traditions,” but rather “mnemonic traditions.”⁸ ... Western modernity, with its countless institutions and homogenizing temporal framework, always sees the oral as preceding the written, as falling somewhere behind in the chronology of development. But as Ailton and many other Indigenous people explain, the practice and activation of memories – through dreaming, singing, dancing, storytelling, and various other activities – are ways of belonging to and sustaining the cosmic sense of life.

⁸ See Yasnaya Aguilar Gil, “(Is There) an indigenous Literature?”, trans. Gloria Chacón, Diálogos 19.1 (Spring 2016), p. 158.

She goes on to quote Ailton about the importance of listening and then to unfold that:

“Either you hear the voices of all the other beings that inhabit the planet alongside you, or you wage war against life on earth” (p. 38) ... Listening means being alive, staying alive, and keeping the ecosystems to which one belongs alive as well. Listening is caring. Not listening brings war: that is, a type of destructive encounter, a form of non-co-existence. We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears ... Our bodies are part of and an extension of the Earth. If we allow them to become sensing instruments for dreaming and conversation, the cosmic sense of life would not be so threatened.

I love this statement: We listen with our entire bodies, not just our ears.

Here is the September image from my small-batch printed calendar from the Colombian muralist who works under the name Somadifusa.

I love how very Semper Vivens it is.



Somadifusa has an Instagram here, but you can also see examples of her art on album covers. Here's one for a collaboration between the Afro-Colombian group Plu con Pla and the US-born producer and instrumentalist Biomigrant:



That album, by the way, is great, and available on Bandcamp here.

The name "Plu con Pla" comes from a traditional dish in Tumaco, a city on the Pacific coast of Colombia. The "Plu" is short for the name of a beloved fish, the plumuda. "Pla" is short for plátano (plantain)--> so, plumuda fish with plantains. The band has a song called "La Plumuda Llegó" about life on the coast, fishing, and the plumuda.

On the first day we spent together, my friend took me down to the edge of Yahuarcaca. That name goes with a group of lakes connected to the Amazon, los lagos Yahuarcaca, but she calls it/them río--Río Yahuarcaca. Like the main river, it inhales and exhales. The waters are at their highest in April or so, and then begin to recede. In June (when I was there this time) they're not at their lowest, but they've receded a good bit. So as you walk beside the water, you're walking in places where you'd be swimming at other times of year. You'd be waaaay under water in April, but in June you're on (more or less) solid ground, breathing air. The same trees that feed the terrestrial creatures drop fruit into the water to feed the water creatures at other times of year. They're watching over and providing for everyone.

"When the forest is flooded, this is a nursery for fish," my friend told me.



Wouldn't you feel safe there? A good place to grow big. It was the fishes' turn to be in this space a few months ago, but at that moment it was our turn. We're sharing the space, just time-slipped. Water creatures were swimming by and over me--time-slipped.

Trees must grow very wise indeed, presiding over two worlds like this. Think of the tales they can tell of all the creatures they watch over.

Genipa americana, known as huito in Spanish, é in Tikuna, is a very wise and generous tree. Francy told me it's a great-great-great grandparent of the Ticuna people.** So when she and her brother took me to meet a huito tree, I felt really lucky to meet it.

Its fruit is edible when ripe, and when unripe, it makes a blue-black protective dye (as described in this entry). In the blink of an eye, my friend's brother was up in the tree. He tossed down a couple of unripe fruits so we could grate them and make some dye back at their house.



**Online I found the story of this written out: Yoi and Ipi, two brothers, came to Earth when it was completely dark: they cut down the giant ceiba that was obscuring the sun, and all manner of plants and animals then were able to flourish. Yoi, the older brother, gave Ipi, the younger brother, the task of growing huito and then grating the fruits. Some of the gratings fell into the water and became fish, which later Yoi caught. The fish he caught became the Tikuna people.

story news
I don't generally like to share news like this ahead of time because I'm afraid of jinxing it, but after a hiatus of two years I should have a longish short story coming out in a venue I won't name yet (again, the jinxing thing). I guess this time I'm risking the jinx because it's just been so long! And I'm very excited to share this story with the world.

It's called "Semper Vivens," but when I was writing it, I called it my Amazon Annihilation story. Not because it's about annihilating the Amazon but because it let me express my feelings--sort of, modified by fiction!--about the Amazon, and the result ended up kind of being my take on some of the movie Annihilation's themes. (I specify the movie because I didn't read the book.)

the babies and the 18-wheeler

Wakanomori and I were in a McDonald's last week, rather late, and there was one other patron present, a middle-aged Puerto Rican guy who was pouring powder-format electrolytes into his Sprite.** He engaged us in conversation from the other side of the establishment.

"You should get a McDonald's card. You get the discount, whatever McDonalds's you go into. On everything. It works everywhere. Here, in New York, in Puerto Rico--wherever you go."

"When we were in Puerto Rico, there was an earthquake," I said. "The McDonalds was the only place with power. Everyone was there."

"Uh-huh, that's right. The McDonald's always have power. Where were you at? Ponce? San Juan?"

"San Juan."

He nodded sagely.

"I came over here 30 years ago," he said. "Drove an 18-wheeler. Brought my babies over. We lived in the 18-wheeler."

"You lived with your babies in an 18-wheeler? You need to write your story!"

"I know," he agreed. "I gotta write my story. Hey Vanessa, you leaving?"

"Just going across the street; I'll be right back, JJ," Vanessa, a McDonald's employee, reassured him.

"Okay, that's good; see you!"

Wakanomori and I boggled all the way home.

I want to read the story about the babies and the 18-wheeler.

**I know because that was actually his opening gambit: did we know you could get electrolytes in this format? Better than buying Gatorade or Pedialyte, he assured us.

I've spend the last two-and-a-half days thinking about and trying to care for a butterfly who came out of its crysalis with a malformed wing. It's as if something got wrapped around the wing and pinched it. Here's the picture I took on the day I noticed it (two days ago):



That day was a sunny day and warm, a good day to enter the butterfly stage of your life and take flight. At first I thought, maybe it can pump enough fluid into that wrinkled wing to get it to unfold. But no, it couldn't.

So it was doomed. It was never going to be flying anywhere. Butterfly raising web pages told me I could make a pet out of it, or I could euthanize it (methods described, nothing awful but the concept was very depressing)--or, unstated, but clearly a choice, I could just leave it be, in which case it would die all on its own.

It was such a sunny day. This is life in the world as a butterfly, friend, I wanted to say. You can't fly, so your life is destined to be quite brief, but I hope you really love this sun. It must feel strange not to be a caterpillar anymore.

Then yesterday was rainy and cold. The butterfly hung on to its spot all day. I brought it flowers because one thing the butterfly raising pages said was you could offer a newly hatched butterfly an array of flowers. But it was too cold a day, maybe, for the butterfly to try to test out the flowers. And I don't know how long the nectar stays nectar-y after the flowers are cut.

Today is sunny (ish), and the butterfly was walking about a little. I read on the butterfly pages about making a honey-water or sugar-water mixture. Put it in a saucer and let them taste it with their feet, the page said. When they realize what it is, they will drink some, if they feel like it.

( two more butterfly pictures, with the flowers I tried tempting it with )

So I made some honey-water and held it where the butterfly could taste it, and it did taste it, and then climbed onto my hand--but when I lifted my hand, it fell fluttering off--but then gamely caught hold of a twig and started climbing up again. I tried again to interest it in the honey-water, and again it climbed onto my hand. I thought I'd carry it over to a stand of cosmos--then it could do the butterfly thing of drinking nectar, have another experience of life as a butterfly before it died. So I walked very slowly and carefully, and the butterfly sat on my hand, calm.

And then a big gust of wind came and carried it off, I don't know where. I looked around my yard, but couldn't see it. But I'm thinking, this means it even--sort of--experienced flight, a little.

I'm glad to have known this butterfly.

Meanwhile, I have a chrysalis on the siding of my house that's just about ready to hatch. I hope it will be healthy and able to fly.