My BLOG for the next month will be an anthem to our Mother Earth, this mostly beautiful, occasionally ugly, sometimes cruel organic ball of mystery on which we live out our lives. In the months of May and June as I ride my bicycle down the West Coast from Vancouver to San Diego, I will try to enjoy and respect and love every curve and stretch of the two-thousand-mile coastline, every hill and valley, every sheltering grove, every quiet village and every bustling city. Robert Frost wrote his own epitaph: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” and the words are carved onto the slab of New England granite that covers his grave in Vermont. I’m not ready yet for an epitaph, but it is time to acknowledge that my life has been and will continue to be a lover’s dance with the earth. I love to go. Anywhere. I once overheard my Mother talking with a neighbor about me. She said, “If someone came along dragging a sack, Jerral would get on it.” I was ten or eleven years old. She had me pegged.

I am fortunate to have known all four of my grandparents. My maternal grandfather died when I was a child, but I knew him well. The other three lived into my own adulthood. I didn’t know any of their parents, my great-grandparents. My great-great grandmother on my Mother’s side was a Cherokee maiden who survived the forced move along the infamous Trail of Tears from somewhere on the Mid-Atlantic Coast to an Indian reservation in what would become the state of Oklahoma. I know almost nothing else about her besides her having lived most of her life as a refugee. Her grand-daughter, my Grannie Lucy, with her long, dark hair and her almond eyes, was as much Native American as she was European. Only a couple of her children and grandchildren still had some of the look of the Cherokee, but I am not one of them. Most of us look like the Western Europeans that we mostly are. Grannie told us stories about her Mother’s experience growing up a half-breed in Oklahoma Territory; but she didn’t know much about her grandmother, the Indian lady; so that history has been lost. What has not been lost is my native ancestors’ respect for the earth. The older I get, the more I feel it. That’s what the next month’s BLOG writings will be about.Until recently, I had an English teacher’s love for a speech that was widely thought to have been spoken by the great Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes in response to an offer in 1854 by President Franklin Pierce to “buy” a large area of Indian land in return for establishing a “reservation” for the Indian People. The speech has been circulated throughout the world to promote projects designed to protect the environment. I learned recently that the speech as I know it was actually written in 1971 by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for the movie “Home.” Apparently Perry pieced together and expanded remarks actually made by Chief Seattle when he received President Pierce’s offer. Perry said later that he assumed the Hollywood editors would give him credit for the speech, but they thought the movie would be more successful if people believed the speech in the movie was actually what Chief Seattle said. It was often reported during Chief Seattle’s lifetime that he was indeed a fine orator (in the Lushootseed language, not English), but the only evidence we have of what he actually said indicates that it was something like “Thank you very much.” Of course, that doesn’t serve my purpose for the BLOG, so I’m falling shamelessly back on Ted Perry’s version of Chief Seattle’s Speech:
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“How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory and the experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful Earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and the man, all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great White Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can lie comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider your offer to buy land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events in the life of my people. The waters murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

The rivers of our brothers they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember to teach your children that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness that you would give my brother. We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s graves behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the Earth from his children, and he does not care.”
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A POET WHOSE WORK I AM LEARNING TO LIKE VERY MUCH is Ilya Kaminsky. In his book, “Dancing in Odessa,” he begins my favorite of his poems with the line, “What ties me to this earth?” The poem hints strongly at a great love (with some fear) of the earth.

ENVOI
by Ilya Kaminsky

What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts,
the birds force themselves into my lines--
the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.

I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa
and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals,
bless the sky inside his body,
the sky my medicine, the sky my country.

I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order.
The wind, my master
insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,--

bless one woman’s brows, her lips
and their salt, bless the roundness
of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern
by which I live my life.

You can find us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed
and I am a man arguing with this woman
among nightstands and tables and chairs.

Lord, give us what you have already given.