Any Action You Take for the Earth

helps us all

This newsletter is for people who want to

• write stories that make a difference

• save the earth

• not give up

• work together

• love fiercely

• live closer to the earth

• live with more depth and meaning

What you’ll find in this issue:

1.    on my mind this summer

2.    a way to walk that lowers PTSD

3.    adults-only fig recipe

4.    invitation if you live anywhere near Darien, Fernandina Beach, or Atlanta

5.    a writing prompt

6.    “Dear Barefoot Ethicist”

7.    unpublished piece of writing lifted from my private journal

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What’s on my mind is gratitude. I’ve spent most of this summer swimming in it. Every morning when I wake I feel a big wave of gratitude roll through, and I say to myself, “Oh, wow, I get another morning in this beautiful world.” Sometimes I say “thank you” right out loud.

When my dog Asa and I go for our walk, I check out the plants and animals around us. We live, as you probably know, on a dirt road that runs from our farm about a mile both north and south before intersecting with rural paved roads.

Three mornings in a row a black racer napped on the bank of a ditch, in a different spot every morning. Usually a young alligator, part of a brood that hatched three years ago, suns at the edge of the road, which runs across the dam of a pond; and seeing me coming, the gator leaps off into duckweed soup. Birds hang out in or around the water—black-bellied whistling ducks, American coots, little blue herons. This morning a wood stork came circling out of the sky and landed. And one more—last week I saw a painted bunting. Imagine that.

Sometimes I think about posting signs that say AMERICAN SAFARI, DRIVE CAREFULLY, which would really be a kinder way of saying, Pay attention, fool. Do you realize how lucky you are?

I do, I do.

Bitterweed (or sneezeweed) is blooming in the pastures. Bitterweed is for southern Georgia as heather is to Scotland, and I feel something ancient and ancestral when I look out over the yellow washes. The first goldenrod came into bloom this week. Most importantly, I think, St. John’s wort (Hypericum) is flowering. St. John’s wort is good medicine, and when it’s in bloom, the land is not depressed. Those three flowers bust out the yellows, but not everything blooming is yellow. Vervain is small and purple. It was the first plant I keyed out by myself after I took my first course in local flora at 19. It’s quite bitter, and I usually pick off a floret, chew it into a wad, and hold that in my mouth like a tiny herbal chaw as I walk.

We’ve had rain every day or two, so nothing is suffering for water. As I walk I think about the heat wave in Europe. Doesn’t it seem that when one part of the globe is getting slammed by the climate crisis, another part skates free? Right now is a happy time for my place, and I hope the same is true for yours.

In my belly I feel a dread, that in our future are storms—bad storms—and also heatwaves, drought, and fire, but at this moment, the last new moon in July, we are spared.

I am so spared. And so grateful.

When I first moved to the country, I was lonely a lot of the time. I wrote about that. Now I’m feeling very grounded. When I say “grounded,” I mean held in place—an embrace. My place is holding me. In return, I am holding it. I am not exaggerating now when I say my primary relationship is with my place. And by “place” I mean the general area where I live, which is the tree-thick coastal plains of southern Georgia, four hours south of Atlanta, and all the beings who live here, including the invisible ones.

When I got back from teaching at Bread Loaf in Vermont earlier this summer, the crape myrtles were foaming with bright pink. They’ve been going six weeks already and are still on fire. Notice how big the trunk of this one is.

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Off the Shelf

My husband picked up a book off the “Just Arrived” shelf at our library called 52 Ways to Walk: The Surprising Science of Walking for Wellness and Joy, One Week at a Time. I wasn’t actually reading this, he was, but he would read juicy parts out loud. Because of this book I’ve become more conscious of swinging my arms when I walk, which activates bilateral stimulation between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. I also occasionally hold my head straight, looking forward, and scan my eyes a few times along the horizon, back and forth. Both of these are forms of EMDR, a trauma therapy that involves eye movement back and forth. Every time I scan the horizon like this, my body takes a really deep breath. It’s nice.

I just finished An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. In the novel, which came out in 2018, aninnocent black man is accused of and convicted of rape, and he is sentenced to years in prison. This is the spellbinding story of his marriage and what happened to it. Oh gosh, I read this book like I used to read as a child, which was ravenously, wolfishly, gluttonously. I often pass books on to my mom, whose book choice runs to the "Miss Julia" series, and she too was transfixed by An American Marriage. Big kudos and much love to Tayari Jones.

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Heads-up

I’m going to be teaching a many-week nonfiction workshop by zoom this fall, so if you’re interested in getting really good at writing, stay tuned. Or send me a message and I’ll make sure you get the info first.

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Figs are in season, and if you are overrun, here’s a great recipe transmitted to me via my friend Mark Albertin, filmmaker. Mark’s last film opposing the titanium mine at the edge of Okefenokee, Sacred Waters, is well worth seeing. It’s 33 minutes long and can be accessed for free here.

The recipe is Bourbon Vanilla Fig Jam. Instead of using vanilla extract, Mark purchased two vanilla beans, discarded the seeds, and cooked them in the boiling puree. Then he discarded the beans before moving on. Happy canning!

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Upcoming

Aug. 28 | Ashantilly Center, 3 pm, Darien, GA

Aug. 31 | Story & Song Bookstore, 4 pm, Fernandina Beach, FL

Sept. 11 |   "Arts at the Confluence" Conversation on the Arts, Environment, and Activism, First Congregational Church of Atlanta, with Margaret Renkl & Billy Renkl, organized by Pearl McHaney & Jane Thorpe, 2 pm. They have planned days of amazing activities that include a concert of “The Marshes of Glynn” at Atlanta Symphony Hall, a symposium, a field trip to Ocmulgee Mounds. The lineup is truly impressive. I hope you’ll join us, and more info is here.

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Engage with the World in Language

A Writing Prompt for You

What’s your relationship to your place? How are you held in place?

Please share your writing if you’re willing. You may drop it into your social media feeds and tag me or use these hashtags #writewithJanisse #writersofthetracklesswil

This is St. John’s wort among deer moss.

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The Barefoot Ethicist

When I was a kid my parents once filled an empty mayonnaise jar with salad dressing, which looked exactly like mayo. Apparently the stuff called salad dressing was cheaper, and my folks thought that we kids wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. (I couldn’t.) Here was an action done ostensibly for a good cause, to save money. It was such a small thing, but I was a serious child, and I obsessed over it. Was it right to trick a kid?

“Right” was the word I used. Was it right? Those days we also used the word “moral,” because in my family the Bible was the judge and jury. If something was right by the Bible, it was moral and good. If it wasn’t in the Bible, it was sinful. After I got grown I quit using the word “moral” and started using the word “ethical” because I believe that humans are guided by laws and standards that are beyond religion.

Some decisions are clear. A pregnant woman shouldn’t drink. Twin Pines shouldn’t mine titanium from the perimeter of Okefenokee Swamp. You shouldn’t use Roundup.

And sometimes it’s confusing to figure out how to do the right thing. Something that seems right—that everyone says is right—can actually turn out to be wrong. To figure out what is really right takes a lot of thinking, considering all possibilities and options. We all have different ethics too. Pat Conroy wrote, in his cookbook, about buying oysters from a man. “Sir, are these oysters local?” Conroy asked after paying the guy. “No, sir. Gotta be honest,” the man replied. “I harvested these oysters over three miles from here.” The man was determined to be honest, and his idea of “local” didn’t extend three miles.

I like being a writer, but I think I’d love to be an ethicist, if I ever get to switch professions. I’m just so passionate about it. I thought I’d start to write about it a little, for fun. If you’re intrigued by it as well, come along.

Dear Barefoot Ethicist,

My kids have fallen for the commercials for Fruit Loops cereal. But a box of official Fruit Loops is $2 more than a box of generic Fruit Loops. I’ve been pouring the generic cereal into the Fruit Loops box. Is that okay to do?

Dad on a Budget

Dear Dad,

Are you trying to avoid confrontation with your children or are you trying not to disappoint them? I’m speaking personally here, but I think that telling the truth and acting truthfully is more important in a relationship than anything else. The poet Adrienne Rich writes about this in her essay, “On Lies, Secrets and Silences.” Switching out the cereal, I’m sorry to tell you, is a form of lying. Lying damages relationships because it erodes trust, even if the party being lied to never finds out. Rich says that an honorable human relationship is a complicated thing, one in which we keep refining the truths that we tell each other, and that doing it—doing the hard thing, honors our human complexity. “So few people will go that hard way with you,” she says. Telling the truth to your children will deepen your complex relationship with them. It will be hard in the moment, priceless in the end.

Having said that, being a parent is a constant struggle against corporate marketing. I remember that limiting screen time with my son was one long battle, and that’s difficult, to say the least. No parent invites that degree of conflict. I’m sorry that you are having to deal with toxic marketing aimed at children (speak of unethical…). I still advise truth. Recycle the Fruit Loops box.

(And consider oatmeal instead of manufactured cereal.)

Thank you for asking my opinion.

The Barefoot Ethicist

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#radical sustainability

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Unpublished, Unfiltered

For you, here’s a piece of writing is lifted straight from journal #27. This was written July 2004 at a workshop at the Lillian Smith home in north Georgia. It may be helpful to know that my first two years of college were at North Georgia College in Dahlonega.

I remember how I felt in the woods when I was a young woman, fresh out of my father’s house and free. Newly free. How can I say it otherwise? The woods were life and breath to me, a spirit that in all our spiritual-ness I had never known. Spirits lived and moved, whispering, in the branches of the poplar and the maple, that mosaic of trees climbing up the shady mountainsides, their roots turning over rocks. I remember how hard I fell in love with the mountains. I remember when I found gold, flakes of gold, in the stream above the college. In the right woods the trailing arbutus bloomed. I did not abandon this place. My leaving was a gift to it, one less person to shave away a flat spot on a slope, one less reason to pave a road, one less excuse for the interstate-builders. I remember how much I came back at first, and then how I never came back at all, and then when I came again I was a stranger—and I could not claim a kinship of any form with the place. Yet in my memory it had held a space, so that the ridges and rivers were not new to my eyes, but ancient.