Revealing Relationships: Healing Ourselves and Our Home
5 Native
8 Redwoods
Environmental Organizations and Resources
Acknowledgements
Flowing down from the Sierra, the fast-moving white water of the Yuba River charges through granite boulders, shaping the landscape and nurturing life. For me, the Yuba is a metaphor for the powerful stream of ideas that have helped form and sustain my thinking, and have guided me toward a fuller understanding of our often chaotic world. Here are some of the authors who have been strong currents in my Yuba River and have my enduring gratitude:
Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly helps me feel more patient with our current ecological folly as she skewers the history of human foibles with unerring aim and a touch of humor.
Rachel Carson’s life and work teaches me about courage and honesty, the power of one voice and the complexities of our uneasy relationship with chemicals.
Rianne Eiseler’s The Chalice and the Blade, reveals the conflicting narratives that inform our culture and gives me hope we may return to being a more cooperative society based on partnership rather than dominator models.
Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life illuminated the natural world’s self-organizing web of life and how our own lives are tightly entwined with the intricate and complex processes of natural systems. His work helped lay the conceptual foundation for many of my projects.
Gary Snyder’s mix of art and poetry and bold calls for environmental action inspire me. He is a rugged trail guide using the arts to point out what we have lost and where we need to go to rediscover a healthier relationship with the larger natural world.
Gary Paul Nabhan’s Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture and Story, is rooted in the often hidden history of the indigenous people of the West and their relationship with the land. His lively and warm writing transforms my daily experience, thinking and work.
I am especially grateful to my family: To my mother and father, Joanne and Starrett Kennedy, whose call, “Let’s take a walk,” fostered a love for the birds, woods, fields and lakes. They gave me the freedom to explore the open spaces and to follow my creative impulses; to my brother and sisters for their encouragement. Also, to my own family, the foundation of my life — my husband, Dale Larson, a great spirit, with positive energy, a keen editorial eye, and unflagging support for my creative visions, and our son, Evan Kennedy Larson, an invaluable source of wry humor, perceptive critiques, personal warmth and integrity.
Special thanks to my friends: Julia Claus, for her vision and sturdy station wagon that brought me West to my life on the edge; Katherine Levin-Lau, for her nurturing joie d’vivre and thoughtful artistic reflection through the years; Lynne Stromberg for her bright spirit, wise counsel, and listening to all my stories, even the very long ones; and Eve Page-Mathias, for supporting my artistic projects and my teaching at San Jose City College.
The California Arts Council, The Arts Council of Silicon Valley, Sybase and the Compton Fund have generously assisted my creative career. My artist residencies with Walter Bischoff Galerie, New Pacific Studios and WORKS have offered important periods of reflection and growth. Christine and Dennis Richards, leaders of the Willow Glen Poetry Project and the lively and talented poets in the group continue to provide a crucible to share and refine my work. Parthenia M. Hicks has been a thoughtful guide, and sensitive editor throughout. Kathleen McClung, author of Almost the Rowboat and recipient of numerous poetry awards including the Rita Dove Poetry Award, insightfully contextualized the book and gave me the gift of a thoughtful and deeply perceptive reading. Rose Offner worked with great enthusiam as a book design and publishing consultant, and is an invaluable source of vision and advice.
Also, I am deeply appreciative of Steve Scholl and all the folks at White Cloud Press for believing in my work and using their remarkable talents to launch Nature Speaks into the larger currents of ideas, art, and poetry that are, hopefully, carrying us closer to a more caring relationship to our home, the Earth.
Foreword
by Kathleen McClung
Honoring moon and sun and all that grows on earth, Nature Speaks: Art and Poetry for the Earth offers us the opportunity to savor Deborah Kennedy’s artistry and urgency in not one but two branches of creativity — visual art and lyrical poetry. Kennedy is widely known in California and beyond for solo and group shows of her paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and large-scale installations. Her first public artwork, titled Ecotech commissioned in the early 1990s for a new public transit line in Silicon Valley, consisted of a six-ton boulder cut into thick slabs, embodying a key concept of holistic thinking, the relationship between the parts and the whole. She etched and inlaid mesmerizing images into the surface of the huge, polished stone and topped one slab with bronze casting, emphasizing the relationship of technology and nature.
Since that influential public art project — still installed in the city of San Jose — she has continued focusing both her art and her poems on the most pressing ecological themes of our time — climate change, species extinction, cancers from toxic chemicals, as well as our interconnectedness and pathways to healing. I love the arc and architecture of this book, which moves from praising the fundamental web of life in Part One to mourning a damaged and “sinking world” in Part Two to decrying the poisons surrounding and within our bodies in Part Three to encouraging vital new thought and action in Part Four.
The journey we take through this extraordinary book is challenging but ultimately rewarding and revitalizing, as all life-changing journeys are. We see horrors — “wings fold / like crumpled paper, birds plummet from the skies” and “Breast milk is now / tainted, hidden poisons / in a mother’s gift.” And yet we also see images of hope — “Hummingbirds defend beads of nectar crowning my Mexican sage” and “white violets/ dance like
