The Craft: Altars of Extinction

L. Frank Menninguez (Raven's Manzanita) from
Mary Gomes' Altars of Extinction.

Fifteen years ago I stumbled upon Mary Gomes' project Altars of Extinction.
It inspired me deeply.  It was beautiful, creative, haunting, and important.  It was something I could really get my head around, but not yet my heart.  I didn't want to just care, I wanted to actually act.  Yet, I didn't.  Not then.  Not in meaningful ways.  Something just wasn't catalyzing in me yet and I was disappointed in that part of myself.  As ecological literacy educators are eager for us to all know, when it comes to heroic actions, like saving something, the most power comes to the individual who truly loves what they are saving.

Didn't I love nature and all its creatures great and small?

My answer in retrospect is no.  I respected it, well at least more than many people sharing my city with me.  I appreciated it, found it beautiful, and benefited from time spent communing in it, but no, I didn't love it.  I even grew up in nature.  I had the benefit of living on a small farm with big animals and running free in the woods without an adult in sight for hours.  Yet, I still didn't love nature in the way that would empower me to lift a two ton car off of its crushed leg.  (Or more accurately help reduce the estimated 1 billion cars crushing and chocking it worldwide.)  Ironically, I didn't fall in love with nature until I did the one action of my life that would wound it the most and became a mother.

My rite of passage into motherhood started with a stark initiation.  After a year of trying to conceive a child, I had tests, a surgery and a bleak prognosis - about a 1-5% chance that I would ever conceive a child naturally.  What followed was a literal beat the earth with your fist process of grief.  I had been a teenage girl in the eighties and all I had ever heard about pregnancy was "a woman's right to choose".  I had been living under the false assumption that it was all in my control.  Infertility schooled me and exiled me from my pack at the top of the food chain.  I wasn't in control, not like I thought I was, so rather than turning to the medical community I turned to nature.  Not for holistic treatments for infertility but for solace.  And, sadly, I found overwhelming company for my misery there.

Infertility was my personal initiation into extinction and Gary Snyder was my poetic shaman, "Death is one thing, an end to birth is something else."  I suddenly understood, no I FELT, all the animals grieving with me.  While well meaning friends were suggesting, "There are treatments..." I was enduring a rite of passage that was bonding me to a much bigger tribe; all the species suffering extinction at the hands of our unforgivable abuse of the communal environment.

I had a go-to mound of dirt that bore the brunt of my enacted rage.  It held its ground, until one day my anger finally gave way to sadness.  Then, the punches became tears and I was nearing the end of my initiation.  In fact, just a day before I was to learn that I had somehow miraculously beat those dire odds, and was indeed pregnant, two tiny mushrooms had burst through my mourning mound.  Which was just perfect.  Mushrooms, the lifeforms that push through and thrive from a big pile of crap.  I didn't need any more signs, I had gotten the message.  I had been given a second chance at life by being given the privilege of birth.  There was no doubt I was going to live differently.

So as I became a mother I finally became a true steward.  I was bound to the earth at the same time I was bound to my children through love.  I think of that paradoxical, mythic, moment in which I was granted a boon (the gift of birth) by a higher power that would be injured by the very gift it gave.  Not just one, but two more humans were granted.  Cute as their impossibly tiny toes may be one day they would create two more daunting footprints.  A heavy cost for nature whom in my opinion should in turn exact a payment.  So, in return for their lives I promised to raise my first and second born to be stewards committed to healing our mistakes and achieving sustainability.  I started reading up on ecological literacy and environmental education when E.P. was still swaddled.  I had a starting point, "Protect and nurture their innate biophilia."

It was a relief, learning that human babies are born preprogrammed to love nature.  I did underestimate, however, how difficult it would be to protect that natural instinct.  I listened to David Sobel's rule of "no tragedies before fourth grade" and tried to only provide positive opportunities to bond, wonder, and explore nature together.  I decided to save things like a family altar dedicated to our current mass extinction event for a few years down the road.

What one decade has proven in regards to how fast we are pushing our planet into dire peril has been staggering however.  Although Baanko is only in second grade the tragedies are too pervasive to push off.  She doesn't get to wait until fourth grade.  We don't get to wait another moment.  NOW is the moment we all need to activate our biophilia as the superpower necessary to save far more than just ourselves.

So, this year we made our first altar of extinction.  We placed it in the corner next to the Dead Letter Office.  I saw first hand why David Sobel made his fourth grade rule.   It was a simple altar but it hit the kids hard, particularly Baanko.  She moved the framed picture of Sudan, the last northern white male rhino that died earlier this year,  as if trying to get it placed perfectly.  The feeling we all shared was that there was no right place to put it.  It was all wrong.  She asked questions.  She tried to make sense of something so senseless.  I had to answer questions about guns, not the poachers but rather those humans armed to protect him in his last years from other humans.  She looked confused.  I felt sad.  In 2018 there is no protecting their biophilia.  There is only nourishing it and teaching them how to assert it.

Usually my entries under the title "The Craft" are full of whimsy, creativity, and tutorials.  Even if we are addressing a heavy topic usually our handiwork and what we learn leaves us in a more hopeful place than before we began.  Not this time however.  We completed our altar.  Every night we feel it in the corner, its one votive light, vigilantly flickering on Sudan's picture as if to remind how low our the planetary wick has become.

The kids spend their altar time focused on their family tree and their human ancestors.  I can't help but feel taken back much further and deeper to The Tree that Time Built  and the ancestors of the animals that I know currently face a truly terrifying expedited rate of extinction.  Just this morning WWF published a report about man-made factors creating a "mindblowing" crisis for wildlife:

"WWF UK Chief Executive Tanya Steele added in a statement, "We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it."

Reading our impact I feel grief of a global proportion and I am grateful for it.  It is part of the gift I was given with the conception of my children.  It is a result of the love that I finally authentically feel for all of nature.  Love born of compassion - suffering with.  It is a painful experience, like birth itself, but one I desperately wanted and must continue to repay by keeping my promise:  To help my children love nature enough to save it.

The Craft: A Dead Letter Office

This year we created a Dead Letter Office so that we can communicate with the dead.  I know, it sounds spooky, occult...taboo.  I can even imagine someone thinking, "Who in their right mind would teach a child to do that?"  When in fact, it was my children who taught me how to do it.  Like all great inventions it came from necessity.  Baanko's desire to talk to her ancestors was a natural result of her time spent at our family ancestor altar.  She had heard funny, inspiring, sometimes unbelievable stories.  She had touched vintage tea cups and stones from grave sites far away.  She had spent hours looking at crumbling black and white photographs.  So it was no surprise when she wanted to tell her grandpa,  a man whom she would never meet in person, a few things.  As I processed the request she almost instantaneously offered the solution: "Maybe I could write a letter to him?"  

And as it often does, her little idea expanded into an entire crafternoon.

In the basement we found the goose feathers that we gathered last May.  They were seasoned and dry.

Following the natural curve of the feather we sliced a tip and cleaned out the shaft.

You already know our policy on glitter making things feel even more magical.

We prepared paper that evoked feelings of days gone by.

And of course, magical ink.  We chose a coffee base and read up on recipes for dragon's blood and other magical inks.

We were ready to get to work on fulfilling a wish: for our ancestors to know how much we still care for them and appreciate the lives that they lived.

My addition to the altar was a vintage Royal typewriter that I've had since I was my daughter's age.  It is impossibly heavy which makes its transport, even from one room of the house to another, an event.  Placing it down is like a dinosaurs foot impacting the earth.  Heavy with the accumulation of all of the history that it has helped to document it is incredibly grounding for me.  It's an artifact.  It commands respect, I see that in my children's slow approach and exaggerated "whoa".  It is a natural choice for connecting with the past.

I realize that although no seance is necessary a medium certainly is and that medium should be well chosen since it has a profound affect on the very message that it conveys.  The scratch of the quill pen against thick rough paper.  Errant drops of coffee and dragon blood scented ink on fingers that are rhythmically dipping to deliver a precious few words at a time.  The smell of sulfur followed by melted sealing wax.  The slow extension of long metal arms imprinting one inky letter at a time at the expense of one strong, and tiring push of a finger after the next.  These are mediums of communication that allow for magic to happen.  They remind us that our words have force and that meaningful communication takes time and effort.  They command all of our senses to be present as they move at a different pace.  They slow us, like a special effect in a movie, to show us how important this very moment is.  These mediums truly are the message, as Marshall McCluhan suggested, and they are saying, "Be here now."

Which, come to think of it, is what a medium is commanding in a seance in traditional necromancy.  Except the command is made of the deceased to join the living to offer insights, messages, perhaps even to portend the future.  In our magical workings we are commanding only ourselves, our full selves, to be here now.  In fact, the longer we do magic at the Warthogs School the more I am convinced we are really one trick witches and wizards. We have one spell that we are ever casting, or more accurately ever under the influence of - the magic of the present moment.  Yes, our magic is simple but definitely not easy and I am confident it could take an entire lifetime to master this one power.  For us, we are not interested in the supernatural because we've found, again and again, that the best magic seems to be ever afoot in the natural world all around us.  If only, we are full present, in the moment, to experience it. 

Which Baanko and I did at the tail/tale end of our crafternoon.  Shortly after placing her letter on the altar we noticed three mule deers casually walking down our sidewalk.  We watched in wonder.  It was a wonder for us recent rural dwellers that even close to town we could count on deer visitations.  We wondered if they could sense things we could not including if any of our ancestors were close by, or if they might be our ancestors in another form.  We wondered about the mystery of life and death.  We read a letter written by my now deceased cousin about tracking, loving, and hunting deer.  We thanked them all, animal and ancestor, for keeping us awake while we are alive.

Wild Child Wednesday: And in turn, the river speaks to us again.

Our return to the river today was bittersweet.  It has been months since E.P. traded home school for his village school and we are used to the new routine.  Packing up the old blue backpack for a stolen Wild Child Wednesday adventure felt familiar and extra exciting.  We've had unfinished business to attend to and today was the day.  Nature waits for no one so school would have to.  E.P. broke out into a run as soon as we hit our well worn old homeschool trail.

Last year on one of our weekly visits to the Deschutes River we learned about the fate that the fish face every October when the water level is lowered at Wikiup Dam.   We missed the fish salvage that was set to occur the very next day.  Still eager to be of help we marked the calendar so that we would be ready this October.



This morning the earth was still frozen when we found a crew at what proved to be the largest and most populated entrapment of water.  They were just braving the frigid water and beginning to pull in the net. 



It took two and a half hours.
As a team we netted the fish.



We counted them; rainbow Trout, Sculpin, Whitefish, Kokanee. (And something none of us could recognize.)

And then, one volunteer at a time, we headed up the trail with a bucket of fish to reunite with the flowing river.  It's a hike that on a day with no pack I'm pleasantly winded.  With each five gallon bucket of water and fish I was stopping out of necessity every 5 minutes.  My arms were letting me know that they wouldn't cooperate indefinitely.  But the beauty and the abundance of the captured fish in transit were breath giving (rather than taking).  Staring in the bucket I'd catch enough of my breath and keep going.  In just over two hours time we saved over 1200 fish from our first net pull.



I remember last year being worried that it might be upsetting for E.P.  to process the fact that it is impossible to save all the fish.  At one point a man, the one counting and identifying what we were saving, had made brief mention of needing to pick up our pace, perhaps move to shocking and netting, since fish were suffocating in other pools of water down the river bed.  We were a smooth running machine at that point and after his mention I felt a steady uptick in our communal speed.  Like a knob being easily turned from level five to seven.  No one panicked.   I felt insulated from my easily triggered state of overwhelm.  I felt clear and focused and engaged.  I felt that incredible gift, that wonderful side effect, of being of use.  We were part of something bigger than ourselves and together we were making a difference.  Together we were keeping one another going.  Our pool of trapped fish was a well spring, albeit frigid, of hands on knowing that what we were doing mattered, immediately.  He didn't use the word grit but E.P. marveled at his experience of feeling he needed nothing but to keep going with the mission.  The boy who seemingly never stops eating had no hunger.  The boy who could be labeled inattentive wouldn't break focus until we had the last fish returned to the river.

While I was walking the empty buckets back down the trail to our team I took comfort in my station in our temporary bucket line.  A headline that I saw just before we headed out in the morning regarding our climate was still burning in my mind.  "The World is On Fire." Walking in silence was helping me process it.  With each step that I took I thought of bucket lines of humans, past and future, putting out fires, working against floods, working to save what can be saved together.  With each step, for that morning at least, I was one of many doing a small part.  I was overriding my own comfort craving body for all the helpless fish enduring our rescue mission.  I was acting.

As I placed my empty bucks down back at the netting I looked at every volunteer tending to the negative consequences that we create for other species.  They all had, for today, an answer to the question, "What did you do?"

hieroglyphic stairway 

--Drew Dellinger© 2017 

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars
I am everything already lost
the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos
I use words to instigate silence
I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane
a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time
I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea
I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods
I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire
it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech

Mystery School Mondays: Altar-ing our perspective on death.

Each year, on the New Ancestor Moon, we dedicate a large space in our living room to death.  Rather than one hallowed eve, we spend the entire lunar month honoring this great mystery and those it has already taken from us.  Over the years, as time demands, our ancestor altar slowly grows.  This year we framed a picture of my sweet uncle who passed away just before Christmas last year and carefully nestled his image near that of his oldest brother and parents.  The process of making the altar is always bittersweet.  We feel the loss of no longer having those that we love alongside us in the world today.  Yet, we also are enlivened by seeing an image of them that so well conveys their essence.  Most often we've selected pictures of them at peak enjoyment of their lives and being their most inspired and authentic selves.  Their immortalized joy and zeal reminding us to live well while we can.  Bright fabrics of smiling skeletons and tissue paper flowers frame our memories with a festive, celebratory feeling.  In honoring death our altar inspires us to deeply appreciate the life that we still have.

As word has circulated through our extended family about not only our altar but the "dumb supper" we host yearly, curious items have begun arriving annually in the mail;  a fragile, yellowed newspaper clipping, a special necklace, a dusty cemetery rock, a handwritten grade school autobiography.  Each arrival initiates a quest, or at least a phone call, to a branch of the family tree.  Our need to "get the story straight" on our dearly departed always leads to a deeper connection with the family that we still have with us.  I am convinced that this savoring of our kinship would not be prioritized had we never stumbled into the seasonal part-time gig as our lineage's wisdom keepers. 

This year as I was sewing a paper binder that would preserve some precious handwritten letters,  I realized that this work is a craft, a service, and a responsibility.  I can't help but surmise, by the steady stream of items directed our way, that others know deep in our tribal bones that we're all a bit delinquent when it comes to keeping Death, and those it inevitably takes, in our lives.

It has been my experience that our common culture doesn't encourage this type of work.  The reality of death doesn't seem to have a place in a social landscape where themes of death and destruction dominate much of our entertainment while age defying advertising tell us to avoid the prospect of entropy at all costs.  Either we are obsessed or in denial of death and from the looks of things neither approach is working well for us.  A friend so poignantly summed it up for me after she experienced her father pass away in his hospital bed this summer.  "It was just all so scary to me.  I wasn't exposed to death before.  All I could feel was fear.  I wish I had been able to feel something else...we do it all wrong in this culture..."

Our ancestor altar is my attempt to do it differently in our family's own micro-culture.  So far, I can see an intimacy with death developing in our children that is rich with many feelings rather than dominated by the one and only feeling of fear.  It comes through the storytelling.  It comes from them witnessing first hand that when you die you are not forgotten.  They feel connection, experience legacy, and endure the force of mystery all with curiosity as their guide.  My job, as I am coming to understand it, is to be the keeper of the artifacts that initiate the questions that will lead them on their own journey of self-understanding.

This fall at The Warthog School we are going to post a few more explorations we have regarding the mystery of death.  As always we would love to hear any suggestions you may have about sharing the cycles of life and death in a naturally magical way with children.

As part of our "dumb supper" every year we read "The Tale of the Sands" found in Linda Booth Sweeneys book Connected Wisdom: Living Stories about Living Systems.  Interestingly, it is within her book of "living stories about living systems" that we have found the best story to share with our children regarding death.  Her commentary begins, "Everything in nature moves in cycles..."