poets, places + climate change?

Good afternoon babes and bots! 

What's hopping and popping in your life today? Everything is still flooded, or on fire, or out of power, or some combination of the three. And Creepy Joe is out there making speeches. And radical activists are out there radicalizing the world with their activism. And I'm sitting on a couch writing a blog post that four people might read. So here's Childish Gambino. 

more trees, please

So I was hiking through a gorgeous piece of unceded Cherokee land in Tennesee violently renamed Great Smokey Mountains National Park. As it turns out, when nasty president jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 18somethingstupid, Cherokee were among the many Indigenous peoples forced into Oklahoma. Some remained, however, under the leadership of an epic warrior named Tsali. Their descendants live on the Qualla Reservation. 

I had not previously understood why they were called the Great Smokeys. Linguistically, great smokies is a botched translation of the Cherokee word, Shaconage, meaning "land of blue smoke." But I was still under the impression that I might be able to see something if I climbed high enough. Let me paint a picture for you...

a painted picture 

You wake up early to go on a lovingly difficult 11.2 mile hike in the smokies. You've got snacks. You've got a first aid kit because you're reading a book about a woman who falls in the woods, smashes her pelvis, and is stranded in straight sunshine for 4 days and you say to yourself, this woman sounds exactly like me. You've got a knife. You've got lunch. You've got 3 liters of water because why the fuck not. You've got no underwear on in an effort to limit the number of sweaty fabrics on your butt. You are prepared for something long and epic and hard, and the first 2.5 miles really are! But then you start hiking downhill and worry you will lose all that good progress! You call yourself a capitalist. You tell yourself it's not about the destination it's about the journey. You stop at least three times to attend to the blisters forming on your heels that you (shocker) don't have anything in that haphazard first aid kit for. You're hiking along, wondering when the "great vistas" are going to pop out. You start to feel claustrophobic with all these trees and the spider webs you're walking into. Everything is taller than you and you miss the desert. You think the top will be better, you can't wait. You pass a through-hiker on the Appalachian Trail (which you're on for about 2 miles) and you talk with him. He is older, in perfect shape, carrying a backpack the size of a baby goat (or, the size of your day pack but let's not talk about that). He doesn't use a sleeping pad. HE DOESN'T USE A SLEEPING PAD. You wonder if you, too, should also stop using a sleeping pad. You decide this slightly sweaty man with 230 miles left on his journey is probably not sleeping & you are just not above that. So you finally make it to the top of this mountain thinking finally, a view. You discover you've hiked the shortest peak in the park and everything is still taller than you. This information is concealed from you for 30 minutes by a vast swath of clouds. Shaconage makes sense now. You take a lot of selfies, attempt to dry all of your clothes on a hot rock, and eat your lunch with the ants. You have a transformative nature moment (it took at least an hour), love everything you've ever seen, thank the earth for making this large cluster of rocks & trees possible, cry a little at the beauty of it all, and then head back down just in time to skirt 4 large groups of hikers heading to the same destination. So nice I could be naked up there all by myself, you say at an audible level. Everyone can hear you. You hike all the way down in no time at all. You're sweaty and you smell atrocious so you take a bath in the river and it's awesome. So cold. So clear. You want to eat it but you don't, thank god. You return to your car with so much chafing on your butt you can't move in your seat. Underwear might have prevented this. You keep driving. 
i swear i made it to the top you just can't see

poets also go to the woods alone 

In fact, Mary Oliver wrote a love poem about it. 
Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.

**

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.
It is as true to me as anything that I pray alone in the woods, that hiking, sometimes being naked on smokey peaks, is holy. The poet William Blake has a similar sentiment in his poem titled "Everything that lives is holy" which is, I believe, the best line. Yet another great poet whose work we do not have much of, Ruth Muskrat Bronson, wrote: "Sonnets from the Cherokee," a beautiful, deft, violent ode to her lover, or her many lovers, named and unnamed. 
What is this nameless something that I want,
Forever groping blindly, without light,—
A ghost of pain that does forever haunt
My days, and make my heart eternal night?
I think it is your face I so long for,
Your eyes that read my soul at one warm glance;
Your lips that I may touch with mine no more
Have left me in their stead a thrusting lance
Of fire that burns my lips and sears my heart
As all the dreary wanton years wear through
Their hopeless dragging days. No lover’s art
Can lift full, heavy sorrow from my view
Or still my restless longing, purge my hate,
Because I learned I loved you, dear, too late.

I can't help but read this last line and feel some sort of grief, far more than a simple longing. I am reminded once more of the many kinds of grief, the kinds of grief some of us experience by nature of our history, the way grief builds protective walls, that we grieve all our lives and those griefs are so vastly different. The fact that Bronson's grief is a grief still felt cannot be lost, nor should that familiar tinge of heartbreak that makes such grief familiar and dramatically unfamiliar to me. Griefs are isolating, and violent. They hurt us, sometimes physically, and we carry them in perpetuity. My therapist tells me, nearly constantly, that many things have no words. It often angers me how short the language I know seems to fall. 

In lieu of any real closing sentiment, I cite again what Natalie Diaz said in her reading many months ago: "all the griefs I've had I still have." 

Thanks for taking a bite out of this sandwich with me. 

xoxo BLT

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