Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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Nurturing Sense of Place Through the Literature of the Bioregion / Patrick Howard

Abstract:  This paper explores the possibility that a participatory engagement with the literature of the bioregion, in this case the North Atlantic coast, may work against the life alienating tendencies of our modern culture, to reaffirm and renew our children’s consciousness of and sensitivity for their place in a larger Earth community. We are in need of another way of knowing our place, a way to activate and reactivate the complex articulations and relations of things. Through the literature of the bioregion and a bodily, imaginative and participatory engagement with the other-than-human, children can return to the conditions of human embeddedness in the world.

Abandoned Outport

Sun on boarded windows Deep in graveyard grass
and gull-cries snails and lichens
high in the August clouds. Cling to a headstone

On a small beach path: Across the schoolhouse floor:
blue- bells nodding paper scraps, dry seaweed
over driftwood. And a dead moth.

A bee is buzzing Against a cold twilight:
Inside dark cracks dark picket- fences
in a window pane. And a crow’s flight

Clover meadow: In a rising moon:
above a rusting ploughshare a church steeple
a butterfly. And lilac leaves.

A sudden fog
and sea- winds
bend to the sting- nettle.
--Tom Dawe

A Poetic Relation with Place.

<1> Literature offers a way of experiencing place, of knowing place, that is outside the scientific, theoretical approaches to environmental and place research. This other way of knowing resists the objectification and categorization of our experience of place. Literature offers an articulation of experience through a richness and concreteness that is at the same time multi-layered and subtle. Literature proffers a sense of our lifeworld, as we move through space, that is a coalescence of the real and the imagined, the physical and the spiritual, the conscious and the unconscious, the intellectual and the emotional. Through poetry, like that of Newfoundland’s Tom Dawe (1984), we are able to enter into an existential dialogue of experience and environment. The delicate haiku structure of Dawe’s poem sensorially reveals in its simplicity the wonder, awe and profound sadness intertwined with poignant images of stark beauty. Undeniably, the poem reveals a way of knowing place – in this case an abandoned Newfoundland fishing village. Through the power of language, place is manifested. We come to understand the central quality of space is indeed as Alan Gussow described it; “ The catalyst that converts any physical location, any environment if you will- into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings” (Gussow, 1971?, p.27, in Relph,1976, p. 142). The poet cradles his poem between the sun and the moon. The deep love and attachment of the former inhabitants for the abandoned settlement is palpable.

<2> The line “As near to heaven by sea” has been used by Newfoundlanders to describe their island home. The words are attributed to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the man who claimed a New Founde Land for Queen Elizabeth I in 1583. It was purportedly his last utterance (‘ We are as near to heaven by sea as by land’) before being swept away in a violent North Atlantic storm. His words, now immortalized, speak to a tacit interrelatedness of the land, the sea and the spiritual that floats darkly, submerged just below the surface to rise on closer inspection when one is taken to peer into the depths of this place. Life on that island is marked by an uneasy tension, the juxtaposition of living surrounded by that which is at once beneficent and at the same time terribly exacting in its toll on human flesh. The power of the sea is biblical - god-like. And the human relationship with this entity is evolving in the moment as people come to terms with a compact broken- a covenant betrayed. The ocean has signaled its limit. Its patience with the unknowable depths of man’s greed and our capacity to destroy and lay waste to a miraculous fecundity serves as a testament to a rejection of that which sustains, nourishes, and in every sense, creates – that which makes us who we are.

<3> People wail and moan; there are tears and gnashing of teeth. The modern high priests- fisheries scientists - huddle in anxious confusion over charts and blink into the luminous glow of computer monitors; they pour over dizzying columns of statistics unnerved by how little they really know. But a truth is beginning to emerge. It is a realization, a hermeneutic interpretation that arises as a dawning or a coming to light. This truth is not the blinding illumination of revelation, but more like the gradual creeping of shadow around the sundial of modernity. It manifests itself as a welling in the pit of the stomach, a chiasma of the cultural, the historical, and the life world that cannot be denied, cannot be rationalized away despite our best efforts to do so. It is not the truth revealed in a computer array. It is another kind of truth; it is like the truth found in the title of Goethe’s autobiography “ Poetry and Truth”. It is a knowing that comes out of deep and ancient roots tapping way down into what it truly means to be human. It is the sense of truth contained in the Greek word ‘aletheia’, which is best translated as openness. On the truth of poetry H-G. Gadamer (1986) says, “ It seems incontrovertible to me that poetic language enjoys a particular and unique relationship to the truth” (p. 105). A poem is an invitation to an open existential conversation of experience and place. “ A genuine poem … allows us to experience ‘nearness’, “ says Gadamer (p. 114); it moves us toward that basic task of life, “ to make ourselves at home” in the world. But, according to Gadamer, poetry goes beyond this even;

Instead it stands over against this process like a mirror held up to it. But what appears in the mirror is not the world, nor this or that thing in the world, but rather this nearness or familiarity in which we stand for awhile. This standing and this nearness find permanence in the language of literature and, most perfectly, in the poem. This is not a romantic theory, but a straight forward description of the fact that language gives all of us access to a world in which certain special forms of human experience arise…(p.115)

It is this openness, this nearness and familiarity, in the bearing witness provided by literature that may point a way.

<4> We are living in an age when our relation to place, and the living environment is undergoing dramatic change. Global forces at work in our lives and in the lives of our children are undeniably altering our relationship to the more-than–human-world. The modern –technological project of Western society has profoundly shaped the way we see ourselves in relation to the living landscape. Jamake Highwater (1981) says in The Primal Mind, “ Our sense of place – of space- is largely determined by the manner in which we see ourselves in relation to nature” (p. 119). If this is so, then our understanding of this relation is crucial to how we live on this Earth, not only with the other life that inhabits it, but also with each other. In light of the ecological crisis and the growing shameful list of ways we have compromised and irrevocably destroyed our earthly heritage, we are in great need of recovering a relationship with our place. There can be no more important project than allowing our children to nurture what seems to come to them ‘naturally’, an embodied integration into the wonder and awe of their natural places. In this paper I will explore the possibility that a participatory engagement with the literature of the bioregion, in this case the North Atlantic coast, may work against the life alienating tendencies of our modern culture, to reaffirm and renew our children’s consciousness of and sensitivity for their place in a larger Earth community.

In Search of a New Story.

<5> For almost two decades I have lived and worked with children of coastal Newfoundland. The collapse of the marine eco-system and the recent naming of cod as an endangered species have had a profound and immediate effect on children, families and communities. My students’ personal, expressive writing through their journals, diaries and writers’ notebooks spoke to me of children struggling with their sense of place in a rapidly changing reality. These are children whose understanding of human –environment relationships is seen as the purview of the science curriculum. With its objectifying stance it may be argued the sciences work against the understanding of a deep interconnectedness that is inherent in who and what we are as human beings. Physically and spiritually we are woven into the life processes that surround us, into the life of our place, our bioregion. When this fabric is torn we are vulnerable, exposed, bereft of that which is supposed to never fail us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the coastal communities of Newfoundland and Labrador – as the fish are destroyed, so too are the dignity and spirit of a once proud, self-sufficient people. Science provides no solace, no answers. The children dutifully calculate their ecological footprints, design recycling posters and dissect owl pellets and sometimes lift their eyes to see out the window a brooding gray sky and a churlish sea. A sea that gives little anymore. Boats toss on their moorings or lay slumped on their sides on the beach, propped uselessly. Men mill around in small groups or bend into the wind on the way to the corner store for a box of beer and some ‘Lotto’ tickets. The children go back to colouring their diagrams of the water cycle.

<6> Science cannot bear the burden we place upon it. The truth it offers is not the truth of which we are in need. Our children need to hear the Earth speak. What is called for is an openness, a space, where the ocean’s voice can find its way in and down to those neglected places in each of us. The epistemological ideals of clarity, detachment and objectivity have silenced nature’s voice. For over three centuries we have been attempting to separate our selves from the organic processes and rhythms of the natural world. The education of our children has been subsumed under a reified subject/object split. Unfortunately, our children learn their lessons well in an educational culture operating under the assumption that what is of significance in education is:

…abstract language – reading, writing, arithmetic - rather than education’s impact on our natural conditions. These assumptions drive consideration of autonomic and sensory learning to a hidden unacknowledged curriculum, where bodies, desires, feelings and sensory attention become vulnerable to manipulation by systemic forces of sometimes dubious motive and effect – for example to produce disciplined workers who demand little and consume a lot. In the process, “nature” is dissociated from human culture, and it is assumed that nature is what arises as an object of observation and study… We do not sufficiently appreciate that to educate a human being into culture is to educate nature, because we are inseparably interrelated with Earth’s biotic community. (MacPherson, 2001, p. 208)

We are in need of another way of knowing our place, a way to activate and reactivate the complex articulations and relations of things. I believe through the literature of the bioregion and a bodily, imaginative and participatory engagement with the other-than-human, children can return to the conditions of human embeddedness in the world. Through the voices of poets the alienation that is our modern legacy may be given over to Gadamer’s ‘nearness’. In a land on the edge with it’s face turned toward a deep and powerful entity, one that soothes and broods, grinds and pummels; it is a life lived in- between on a tenuous boundary to which we can lay no claim. It is a place marked by placelessness – restive, shifting, pervious, impervious. It is not surprising, therefore, that Newfoundland has a long and rich literary tradition and no shortage of poets who have given voice to the essential fullness of life in that bioregion.

Bioregionalism and Living-in–Place.

<7> The term bioregionalism can be traced back to 1974 when Peter Berg, an ecologist, used it to popularize the idea of “living-in–place”. The idea was to “re-inhabit” local places, “ by becoming native to place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it” (Berg and Dasmann, 1978, pp. 217-18,in Berthhold-Bond, 2000, p. 6). Daniel Berthold-Bond (2000) suggests that a definition of bioregionalism is contested because the very idea of a region in which we ‘live-in-place’ is an elusive concept. Berthold-Bond believes this in no way detracts from the philosophy of bioregionalism, but is one of its greatest merits as it gives greater ‘specificity’ to the ‘space’ of nature. He believes “ it subverts the mathematical, topographical, literalist definition of place as objective geographic location ... and develops a new geography of place as experiential, subjective and meaning laden" (Berthold- Bond, 2000, p.7). It is just this experiential lived dimension of the bioregion that offers an opportunity to develop a more complex, subtle picture of the interrelationship between humans and the places they inhabit. The concern is not with the way scientists and geographers parcel out land in manageable pieces, although this is where the contentiousness surrounding bioregionalism resides.

<8> This geographical categorizing, however, is not the point. I know through my direct lived experience that I reside on the coast of the North Atlantic. The exact geographical demarcation is not that important. But I imagine people who live on the other coasts of Newfoundland, on the red clay beaches and fields of Prince Edward Island, along the fir and spruce-lined shores of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick all the way down Maine’s craggy coastline to Cape Ann, and Buzzard’s Bay to Rhode Island know it too. They may not know to which of the three geographically distinct zones they belong, as determined by ocean current and water temperature, but they may sense, in a very different way, an embeddedness, a tacit, implicit awareness that their lives are part of a vast web of perceptions and sensations, of a tidal inherency that makes up a living, breathing landscape. And this is the sense of place and region as intended by bioregionalism. It lends itself more to a phenomenological geography that emphasizes, as Edward Relph (1976) does, the notion that, “[places] are constructed of our memories and affections through repeated encounters and complex associations” (p.26). The ocean affects the architecture, the pattern of settlement, and the place names of the communities. It looms large in the history, the folklore, the music, literature and art. The sea infuses the language with rich metaphor and is evident in an idiosyncratic sense of humour combined with a benign fatalistic outlook on life. Even more importantly, it stands as a living entity in an ecosystem dependent on a participatory reciprocity. We live with and depend on the myriad others of the bioregion as they do on us. Hence Berthold –Bond (2000) believes that a region is “an intrinsically relational structure: it comes into being as a response of inhabitants to the landscape in which they dwell” (my emphasis, p.17).

<9> It is for these reasons that eco-theologian Thomas Berry (1999) has taken up the theory of bioregionalism as a way into a greater intimacy with the larger Earth community. He writes in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future;

…. humans in the natural order of things belong to, are possessed by, and are subject to the geographical place in which they reside. Yet through technological skills humans have become less dependent on their immediate geographic region. We have come to consider that we become more human the more extensively we withdraw from any dependency on our bioregion… There is little or no relation to the fields that grow our food, to the streams that provide our water, to the woodlands that surround us, or to the regional flora and fauna. (pp. 93-94)

Our challenge is to activate and re-activate an attunement and awareness for the bioregions in which we dwell. The regions, the places to which we belong are comprised of interacting life systems. The full diversity of life functions carried out within these systems depend not on individuals, or even species, but on each component of the life region integrating its own functioning within this community to ensure its integrity and survival. Before we look at how inextricably we are tied to place, let us return to the alienation, as noted by Berry, which plagues the modern condition.

Geographic Alienation.

<10> Relph (1976) outlines a continuum of what he calls the experience of the insideness of places. At the deepest levels there is an unselfconscious association with place, an at-homeness, “where your roots are, a centre of safety and security, a field of care and concern” (p.142). In contrast is the shallow or superficial level of insideness which is the experience of being in a place without attending to its qualities or significances. Relph (1976) says when this is the only form of experience of place it “denotes a real failure to ‘see’ or to be involved in places” (p. 142). He goes on to say, “ For those who are swayed by the easy charms of mass culture or the cool attractions of technique this does seem to be the primary, perhaps the only, way of experiencing environments; and consequently they feel no care or commitment for places; they are geographically alienated” (Relph, 1976, p.142). This placelessness is a cutting of roots, a profound alienation that Thomas Berry (1999) calls a collective autism for the voices of the natural world. Relph’s comments about the ‘easy charms of mass culture’ are prophetic twenty-seven years after they were written. The technological- industrial- commercial structures of 21st century globalization has had an alienating affect on human-place relations that Relph could hardly imagine when he wrote those words in 1976. For far too many people there is simply no feeling of intimacy with our place. There is no sense of reciprocity; we expect our place to provide all for us; we have lost the sense of giving ourselves to our place.

<11> This alienation of market globalization can be called “ de-localization” which runs counter to the notion of bioregionalism. David G. Smith (2000) explains, “people and cultures everywhere find themselves being told that all aspects of life are now being defined in terms of a connection to ‘global’ networks” (p.18). The irony is that in the age of the ‘global village’, the disconnect that exists for people in the local, in the lived experience of place, is profound. Everything projects outward, away and to the future in the name of progress and mass consumption. The tragedy is the sense that a psychic and physical world bereft of attachment and lacking intimacy, is also a world of little fulfillment.

<12> For our children, Relph’s alienating ‘cool attractions of technique’ have evolved with potentially serious and life-altering consequences in how they experience place. Brey (1998) acknowledges that cyberspace geographically disembeds place. He says; “Contemporary cyberspace is a terrain that has the potential to become a site where a significant proportion of human conduct takes place” (Brey, 1998, p. 255). This increasing ‘flight to cyberspace’, as Brey calls it, is another manifestation of the de-localization phenomenon. As our children spend more and more of their waking hours in this space we must question what this time is replacing. What does it mean for their relationship with the living landscape? What does it mean for children as developing human beings?

<13> We have successfully pursued the Cartesian dream – to separate ourselves from the organic processes of the natural world. By severing the human self from a larger inclusion in the more-than-human world we have proceeded to deepen the chasm of alienation of the human from the natural world. We must ask ourselves how far we are willing to allow the chasm to separate us from that which makes us truly human.

The Reciprocal Relation: Place and Self.

<14> In his poem “ On the Full Tide” Tom Dawe (1974) reflects on his childhood and offers a deeps sense of the participatory – reciprocal interaction with his place. He desperately seeks the recognition and approval of an old fisherman; yet this recognition is projected onto the land and the sea in which as a child he, too, is deeply invested.

I always felt that
he smiled at me then
as the pure surf smiled at me,
as the ringing cliffs
as the sea-birds
as the children smiled at me
And it was good.

<15> There is something here that transcends mere place attachment that is central to the idea of bioregion. It has to do with the sense that we are a part of our place, and our place is a part of us. There is an element of incorporeality – a deeply felt relationality that when attended to serves to bind us to place. However, it must also be said that being attached to a place does not ensure that we live in a life affirming way with the others that share our place. Nationalistic fervor and love of place as in the Nazi Blut and Boden ideology is a tragic case in point. The experience of the bioregion sees our connection to and dependence on all other life in the region. It assumes a knowledgeable, restrained and respectful use of nature as it recognizes the importance of relationships and systems as well as individuals. Jamake Highwater describes beautifully this notion in the Native American tradition – a tradition from which we have much to learn. Highwater (1981) says that at the end of the communal smoking ritual the participants murmur, “We are all related” (p. 189). His point has particular relevance for our culture as he points to what happens when people become alienated from their place; “when we destroy a people’s experience they become destructive” (Highwater, 1981, p.189). In the Native American tradition tolerance, ethics, duties and rights become unnecessary according to Highwater, for our relationship with all others is predicated on “ the experience of the self as part of others. ‘ We are all related.’” (author’s emphasis, p. 189)

<16> This sense of relationality, of coming to know fully and honestly our place within the bioregion requires an openness, an attunement and engagement with the others, both the human and the more-than–human, who share our place. It requires a turn toward experience and the ‘experiential’. How is it possible to allow children to know their place in this way? To nurture a sensibility for the life of their bioregion? So much of what we do in schools is through the objectifying stance of the sciences, our children learn ‘about’ things- there is little investiture of who they are and a deeply felt exploration of their fundamental connection to their place. We need another way of knowing – one that allows for other voices- other stories. It is through these other stories that children may discover, if not ‘who’ they are, at the very least, they begin to know ‘where’ they are (Howard, 2003). Language and story which leads out into the world in an imaginative, experiential engagement can allow children to turn to the articulatedness of things, to their groundedness. Perhaps it is possible to return to the conditions of human fulfillment and embeddedness in the lifeworld of their place. Just maybe we can confront our place with awe and admiration, respect and veneration. We must try to understand ourselves as participants in and not masters of our biotic communities and in doing so offer children a source of renewal and transformation. Literature can open our children’s hearts and minds to the voice, to the call of their place.

<17> I know this voice, this solicitation, for there are moments when my life and the world’s life seem deeply interconnected. I invoke the language of David Abram (1996) who in The Spell of the Sensuous draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the notion of pathic, embodied knowing. On the coast on which I live, thick, cold fog is drawn into the bay, ghostly tendrils seeking, grasping; skeins of salty vapor envelop the house and descend upon my awareness, dampening my enthusiasm and instilling a lethargy deep within my bones. Then, sometimes, the sun rises brilliantly to fill the bedroom, the cool air stirs the curtains; I hear the gulls cry, the leathery flap of poplar leaves and I rush, innervated, to the window to take in the morning. It is these times I sense my place as a sentient, dynamic landscape capable of its own moods and moments. Somehow, there seems to be a reciprocity between the world and me. There is an embeddedness, a discovery that my perceptions are part of a vast web of perceptions and sensations experienced by other bodies- not just mine, not even human, or even ‘living’ – but by wheeling gulls, crashing waves, and buffeting winds.

The Promise of the Literature of the Bioregion.

<18> Louise Chawla (1999) interviewed 56 environmentalists about their motives for protecting the environment. Two sources of commitment were overwhelmingly indicated; firstly, positive experiences of natural environments in childhood and adolescence, and secondly, family role models who demonstrated an attentive respect for the natural world. The family members or other adults mentioned by the environmentalists were described by Chawla (2002, p. 213) as “voices of appreciation” who encouraged the child to be in natural areas receptively, without barriers of inattention, fear, or defensive control. This study has important implications for the nurturing of children in the life of their bioregion. Some explanation is necessary.

<19> The power of literature to lead children into a greater awareness and “sensibility” for their place requires more attention- particularly when that literature is the work of those writers who give voice to the bioregion. This sensibility can be nurtured through an ecocritical approach to literary studies. Ecocriticism asks how nature is represented in a poem, what role does the land play in the plot of a novel, how are the values expressed in a play consistent with ecological wisdom or how has literacy affected our relationship with the other than human world. Literary theory, for the most part, examines relations between the word and the world – the ‘world’ being synonymous with ‘culture’ or ‘society’. Ecocriticism expands the idea of ‘the world’ to include the entire biotic community- “the ecosphere.” (Glotfelty & Fromm, 1996, p. xix) By leading children to a greater ‘sensibility’, I mean the capacity for physical sensation, the ability to feel. This involves a pathic, embodied understanding of language. Something we downplay culturally, especially in education. Nature-oriented literature and the response to that literature can provide children with role models. Authors’ experiences reveal the natural world in ways that nurture a child’s connection to, and sensibility for, their place. This is especially true when the literature leads out – from the classroom into the world. John Willinsky (1990) urges just this practice when he writes, “ I ask that student and teacher look up from the literature anthology, from their private and shared responses, to study how the poem is part of a larger literature enterprise. It means taking field trips to relentlessly trace the text out into the world” (p.190).

<20> This calls for a re-visioning of what literature and the language arts can be. It means identifying writers and artists of the bioregion who reflect our place back to us, who lead us into the unseen depths so we may immerse ourselves in the living world around us. There are writers of place who allow us to be open, in degrees, to a sentient landscape in which we participate in sensate reciprocity with the myriad others of our life region whether it be river valley, desert, lakeshore, prairie, mountain or coastline. But it is only when, as Abrams reminds us, we slip out of the world solely defined by the human, and begin to trust the intelligence of our sensing bodies can we glimpse the generative depths, and the things around us may awaken to us. Yi Fu Tuan (1976) wrote;

Still better is the use of literature for its power to clarify the nature of experience… for at a deep level literature is the accurate depiction of the ineffable in much of our lives. Most people have difficulty articulating even simple feelings and thoughts. Writers present a world that we have known (ie. experienced) and yet know only darkly; explicit knowing requires the illuminating structure of words and images. (p.261)

<21> Literature allows an opening into our place - into elements of our lifeworlds inaccessibly buoyed, submerged darkly and refracted just out of our reach. Yet poets get there and then stand off shore in the dazzling sparkle. Most often we are so busy we do not notice them there; we dig holes, we name the grains of sand and we construct elaborate crumbling castles. But every now and then we look up and squint, shielding our eyes to make out the shimmering figure whose voice is just audible on the wind. As a teacher I must scan the horizon for those voices and lead my students in. For when we attend to these voices we know our place in a different way; the words lead to a tacit, implicit awareness that our lives are part of a intricate web of perceptions and sensations, of a tidal flow that makes up a living, dynamic environment. There is a breathing sentience to which we belong. It is to this ineffability that E.J. Pratt (1989) seems to point in “ The Ground Swell”;

Three times we heard it calling with a low,
Insistent note; at ebb-tide on the noon;
And at the hour of dusk, when the red moon
Was rising and the tide was on the flow;

There is a sense of denial of our own chosen alienation and a resistance to the ‘calling’. It is our attempt to push down what is undeniable;

Then, at the hour of midnight once gain,
Though we had entered in and shut the door
And drawn the blinds, it crept up from the shore…

<22> John S. Mitchell (1983), too, feels the incessant tug, the pull of this place;

boats upside down
on red wharf
cliffs surround and close
centuries of eyes
in each eye
whispers and whispers
in me

It is only the poet who can suggest that we hear with our eyes, see with our ears, taste with our fingertips. And again, the sibilant undertone of some discomfort, of dis-ease, a perceptual reciprocal relation that unnerves. To gaze upon the cliffs is to feel oneself exposed and visible to the rocky crags. Just as the animate landscape speaks, so too it seems to see, even listen and hear. It is this experience that induces humans to project outward beyond the physical to the supernatural. This wonder and awe elicits a turning to the only possibility in our repertoire that allows us to understand such experiences- the realm of the spiritual, the religious. Reverent, sacred and sacramental images abound in the poetry of Newfoundland. The elemental and the religious are inextricably intertwined. In Tom Dawe’s (1984) “The Madonna” he describes a church abandoned in a small community. Yet even without the former inhabitants the church seems to have interiorized the natural powers of a living land; it is steeped in them:

And there were certain still nights
When the ocean pulsed in calm
And duplicated every season’s moon.
On such nights
The firm church steeple seemed
To waver down on a ribbon of tide…

<23> Al Pittman (1968) in an early collection, Seaweed and Rosaries, writes in “St. Leonard’s Revisited”;

almost reverently
we walked among the rocks
of the holy church
and worshipped roses
in the dead yard
and came again to the cove
as they did after rosary
in the green and salty days

This deep spiritual inter-connectedness wends its way through Pat Byrne’s (2000) “West Moon”. The human and the natural world complement in a sympathetic coalescence, a relationality with elements of the beautiful and the sublime;

So tonight the west moon hangs over the harbour,
Shines down ‘cross the headland and out ’cross the bay,
Shines down through the trees and rests on the graveyard,
As if looking for the souls of the ones moved away.

But there is more here than assigning the beauty of an animate Earth to the divine, to the super-natural. These poets are not merely abstracting out their experiences, for to do that would be to remove or deny the possibility that there is a commonality, an interdependence, that I, as perceiver, and the thing that I perceive, are as John Sallis says, part of the same ‘elementals’. Rather, the poets speak of our dynamic participation in a cosmological whole.

<24> The poet walks in the mystical; the mysterious and straddles the world at once wonder-ful and unutterably other. Al Pittman stands on a dark and dangerous promontory;

From here on the headland
There is nothing
Between us and the world’s dark end
But infinite distance
The night encloses us
As we cling to each other
In darkness
And fall like broken insects
From the sky

Yet here is the balancing act, the finding of our place in this borderland, this boundary where we belong, and still feel alien. It is in this tension, in the betweeness of our existence that we are truly human;

You walk knowing you
Walk with angels
Angry on either side

It is something you’ll only do once
Between here and wherever it is you’re bound

We walk in this yearning – in search of a common ground. We seek to strike the right balance in our separateness and in our sense of being a part of it all. Pittman walks the edge, the precipice, negotiating a place to be fully human -in -the world.

<25> It is not surprising that Pittman would find the mystical and mysterious in that most ubiquitous of Newfoundland birds – the sea gull. A deep sense of harmony, of inhabiting place, of being a part of the world, not in any way separate from another sentient being to which we owe our deepest love and affection - is palpable. There is the reciprocity here by which we must come to know our place.

Something sacred he seems
raised for worship
above the grey sea altar

poised on priest wind hands
he awaits
the genuflection

a certain concern for eternity
kneels me on the salt wet rock
and seeming satisfied
with that small penance
he tips one wing in casual benediction
and moves on seaward
to command another’s adoration.

The similarity in sacramental images is striking when Pittman’s poem is compared to Cape Cod naturalist and poet John Hay’s (1998) “ The Gull”;

The wild white gull comes screaming, billowed and tossed
In the sacred air, over the shore and inland
On the storm. How far and soaring fast it flings
The springing magic of earth, feathers
Aflame in the cruciform of blood and sky,
And tendons taut with excellence! How high
And blest it wheels in tribute through the wind,
To turn past beauty’s shaping to the sea!

It is to the poetry of the bioregion we can turn to flesh out our sense of relationality and our embeddedness within a living landscape. What this requires is an openness; for the aletheia of poetry to manifest itself necessitates an awareness and an engagement with the others, both the human and the more-than-human that share our place. It calls for a turn to the word and a re-turn to the world. It requires an attunement to the writers who give voice to the Earth, but also a re-visioning of a sense of language and literature that leads out into the world. Once again, it requires a return to experience and the ‘experiential’.

<26> When our students read nature-oriented literature and from their reading bump into the beauty of the nature in nature, and from this encounter reach toward writing, the lines between reading, writing and living blur. Distinctions collapse and literature, indeed literacy, leads to life. By immersing children in the life of their place they will be drawn ever deeper into its captivating complexities, and once engaged and fully embodied in the task, it will act as a site of meaningful experience in the world.

<27> As children bear witness to the litany of ecological degradations visited upon their regions, I am challenged to offer a response. I am moved to act within my discipline as the urgency builds daily. And yet, I am distrustful of a call to ‘action’. We are an action driven culture. Despite our best intentions one more schoolyard beautification project, recycling effort (for which the proceeds are used to buy more stuff), or highway clean up campaign, while laudable, doesn’t seem to be adequate. We must break out of the modernist ways of thinking, the binary oppositions that tie us up in always changing the ‘bad’ old ways with the ‘good’ new ways. If we continue on this path we are doomed to failure. I think the action called for is a type of inaction, an opening up, an awareness, a creation of space for silence and deep listening, for reading and writing. It involves learning to let beings bring themselves into appearance by giving voice to themselves through us. It means reading and spending time with the works of those through whom beings have already spoken. It means having children know the Earth in another way than as it is presently known – as mute, inert, merely dumb matter to be probed, analysed - resources to be used efficiently. This is my project; this is my hope. I look to the literature of my bioregion to re-claim a sense of wonder, awe, mystery and reverence for the living world. The ocean is exhausted and withholds her favours. We have subverted a complex life community for, supposedly, our own advantage. We now see that as we destroy and lay waste to the life giving qualities of the Earth so too do we destroy our places and that which makes us human. But we must not lose hope or stop looking for a way forward. I look to language – to invoke language to engage my students in the ever-renewing processes of their biotic community. When I read the poets of my bioregion I feel their words slide off the printed page, germinate - take root. I seek to live in their movement and cadence - words that reveal a larger pulsating rhythm of time and tide.

A Child of the Sea.

<28> Like so many of Louise Chawla’s environmentalists I know there are children blessed with wonderful role-models, children who are being initiated fully into the mysteries of their place. Unfortunately, for a myriad of reasons this experience is being bestowed on fewer and fewer children. The compromising of rural and coastal communities, the increasing urbanization of society, and the lack of green spaces in inner city housing projects, coupled with the time children spend in virtual spaces makes meaningful engagement with the more-than-human world the privilege of a very few. What this means for children and for the Earth remains to be seen. But we must work to provide children with green spaces, natural enclaves, where they may connect and spend the time they desire and need for healthy development as full human beings (Ellis, 2002; Porteous, 1990). Even while encapsulated in sprawling suburbia, or amid the empty lots of high rises of glass and steel, children can be guided toward the mysteries within the encircling horizon of the living Earth, to the progression of the sun and seasons. Even a large American city like Boston, where I recently spent four foggy, soggy days, will forever be a coastal settlement steeped in the Charles River estuary shaped by and bound to the tidal flux and to the fog, wind, rain and snow of its maritime legacy. I believe it is not impossible to lead inner city children in a large Western Canadian prairie city to a sensibility, to a bond that allows them to know the soil beneath the asphalt, to appreciate the tenacity of a thistle breaking the bricks, to sense the setting sun in the shadows that flit in the corners of an empty lot.

<29> I arrive at my project led by children; as a parent by my own children who taught me to see the Earth and rediscover my place; as a teacher led by the very special children of coastal Newfoundland who bear witness to one of the greatest ecological disasters of all time. I look to children and find signs that indicate change is possible. Such a sign came to me through the life, and death, of a young girl….

<30> On a bitterly cold night in February, a vibrant thirteen-year-old girl in the grade eight homeroom across the corridor from mine met with tragic death. I didn’t know Samantha well, but in the weeks following her death her short life would touch mine profoundly.

<31> I volunteered to help Samantha’s homeroom teacher with the difficult task of collecting the young girl’s personal effects. We emptied her desk. As I pulled the stack of textbooks from the bottom basket her Language Arts writing folder slid out onto the floor and struck the toes of my shoes. Beautifully decorated in pastel Crayola markers in the unmistakable calligraphy of a thirteen year old, the cover was emblazoned with the bold life - affirming statement; “ Hey World – It’s Me Sam!” Butterflies, birds, flowers and trees – a stylized leafy border. I picked it up and tenderly held a collection of this young girl’s writings in my hands. Inside the cover, I knew, dwelled her voice, her spirit, her very soul. I didn’t dare open it.

<32> Over the next month, I came to know a girl who was growing in a rich relationship with the life of her bioregion. Samantha had been skiing on the day of her death and the joy she had sought on that cold, sunny February day in the mountains seemed a constant in her life. She was born in a small fishing community on the north west coast of Newfoundland; on learning of the pregnancy Samantha’s mom and dad, living in northern Alberta, packed up for a three thousand mile trip across the country. Her father said quite explicitly that they returned to their village in Newfoundland so they could raise their only daughter as a Newfoundlander. Building their home on a small bluff, with a sunroom toward the sea, the child’s love of the ocean and the land soon became apparent.

<33> Visiting her home two days after her death, I browsed a collage of photographs. Her closest friends had created it. There were the usual birthdays and sleepovers, awkward school pictures, and family shots that blur the distinction between all our lives. However, I was struck by the number of photographs that captured Samantha in, what I was becoming to realize, her natural element – in a boat on the ocean, on a beach in a cove, or in the mountains on her skis. But perhaps the experience that moved me most and captured the way that this child was assimilating her place, her natural world into her sense of self was the recording of her delicate voice singing her favourite song – Saltwater Joys, by Newfoundland singer-songwriter Wayne Chaulk;

I was born down by the water, It’s here I’m going to stay;
I’ve searched for all the reasons why I should go away
But I haven’t got the thirst for all those modern day toys
I think I’ll take my chances with those salt- water joys...

How can I leave those mornings with the sunrise on the cove
And the gulls like flies surrounding Clayton’s wharf?
Platter’s Island wrapped in rainbow in the evening after fog
The ocean smells are perfume to my soul

Some go to where the buildings reach to meet the clouds
Where warm and gentle people turn to swarming faceless crowds
So I’ll do without their riches, the glamour and the noise
And I’ll stay and take my chances with those saltwater joys.

<34> I now see the ‘world’ in Samantha’s spirited declaration; “Hey, world! It’s me – Sam”, was a rich and varied one of close friends, loving family, and supportive community, but also of cobble beaches, ocean waves and silent woods.

<35> And I wonder how might the relationship with nature of this extraordinary young girl be representative of other children’s lived experience? How might it be simply the beautiful and unique circumstance of one individual child? What role can the reading of environmental literature, the writing of poetry and narrative, the experiencing of nature in nature, have in nurturing a sensibility for place and an ecological literacy to develop full, sensitive and respectful members of the bioregional community? Can we have children take up the written word with all its potency and as David Abram (1996) says, “carefully write language back into the land?” (p.273) Can we plant words like seeds, let them take root in the hearts and minds of the children of the bioregion? Can literature, as Franz Kafka says, serve as “an ice pick to break up the frozen sea within us?”

<36> I trembled as I held in my hands the spirit, captured through writing and art, of a dead young girl. Her spirit was word and colour – a declaration to the world emblazoned on pale yellow cardboard. I could not open the folder to peer deeper into her soul. The birds, butterflies, and stylized ivy in beautiful pastel shook me to my core. Her body is gone, but I know there is order in what seems chaotic and random. Every molecule in our bodies was once part of previous bodies, both living and non-living. In this sense our bodies will not die but live on, again and again, because life lives on. We belong to our place, to the Earth, to the universe, when we are at home in it this experience of belonging can make our lives profoundly meaningful. It is what I understand now in the vibrancy of;

“ Hey world, It’s me Sam!”

It will echo in the waves on the cobble beaches of her cove and in the stillness of her forest.

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