born this way

http://www.faireconomy.org/3_principles_for_a_better_tax_system

I'm sure I'm not the only teacher in the Poetry Friday community who takes time in the summer to DIG OUT.  The persistent pressures of classroom life always have me triaging my way through the school year ("What must be done immediately or tomorrow?  What important pieces of paper can be thrown in this tray/folder/pile which I promise I will come back to as soon as I get more than a moment?")

Summer brings that more-than-a-moment, by which time I have forgotten what I put in this tray/folder/pile.  Luckily, much of it is now expired/moot/replaced and can be tossed directly into the recycling! I'm not sure this is the ideal way of dealing with paperwork, but there is a kind of relief in realizing that it's too late now to address quite a few things that seemed pressing a few months ago.

So here in a faded green folder are papers which were saved from my grandmother's things after her death at 95 in 2004, and which were in turn rescued from my parents' recent move into a very downsized cottage.  They are a mix of letters received by my grandmother from relatives of the 19th century, missives from my mother as a young mother to my grandmother, from me and my brother from summer camp to home in the 70's.

And here!  Original copies of poems written by Heidi as a child!  Here is the first poem I remember intentionally writing As A Poet, I think in 2nd grade.  This is a copy rewritten by a later Heidi with more developed cursive and no doubt a vision of her own poetry collection:

This list of wishes, dated Fall 1973, shows the heavy influence of all my reading and learning about Native American Indian history and culture.  Probably 90% of that information was incorrect or, at best, approximate (much came from the fictionalized facts of the Childhood of Famous Americans series), but what I did understand is that what we now call indigenous peoples lived on the land in a respectful harmony with its resources.

 Kind of fascinating, right?  The power of that fantasy was intense throughout my middle childhood.

And here--I am 11--is more evidence that my recent conversion to vociferous climate activist is really just a continuation of lifelong concerns.  😊

Perhaps you too were born this way.  (Perhaps ALL children are born with an innate understanding of our physical connection to the Earth; is that why we all will eat dirt given half a chance?)  Perhaps we all were born this way, and then the culture of achievement and consumption misled us, made us forget that knowing how to get tomatoes from nothing but seeds, rain and dirt might ultimately be more important than how to efficiently Google "vintage editions 1964 Childhood of Famous Americans."

In my searching this morning I came across this quote from Sitting Bull, "Dakota Boy."

It has become very very difficult to judge what is enough.  (Which makes it very very hard to tell if we ourselves are enough.)  So as I dig out and sift through this summer, I'm asking: does this thing I have always done, that I was sure I wanted to do, this object that I hang on to, still make sense right now?  Or can I let go, do with the less that is enough?

Our Poetry Friday host this week is Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect, where she and her Poetry Sisters are ringing us with triolets.  Isn't it nice that we can get there without too many CO2 emissions?