Our Grandmothers Were Green

On the original cover of her classic memoir-cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking, Ms. Edna Lewis stands, lithe and muscular, in a green field looking over the fruit shc's selected for making a meal. Her face is serene and contemplative. She's magnetic and seems to beam though she is not smiling. Her hair, perhaps lightly hotcombed, is as natural as the food she puts on her table. She wears the long, cottony silver strands brushed away from her face and tucked in a neat chignon gathered in back of her head. Contrasting with her simple, starched cotton dress Miss Edna's only flourish is a pair of dangling ornate silver earrings that lend a little of the Far East to her look.

Music. Food. Writing. It's said that all of these absorb all of the elements and energy that go into the making of them. When I see Ms. Edna's face and read what she has to say, it brings me calm because I get a sense of some of those things that went into the making of her. She is earthy and elegant, full of culture, memory and vitality. The kind that Alice Walker writes about in "Longing to Die of Old Age" (from Living By the Word). A foremother to ones like Dori Sanders.

A friend who knows how much I take to heart Jessica Harris' words that "There is history in the pot," recently sent me this "What is Southern?" piece, a prose poem/letter written by Edna Lewis and published a couple years back in Gourmet magazine. I'm sharing with the hope that we all enjoy, remember, preserve and do all we can to pass forward these traditions. Even if it's just telling the story that begins with the words, "There once was a time when..."

Sacred Water

Image from Shinto and Jinja website

[One of pure-heart] will be like a tree planted by streams of water, Which yields its fruit in its season And its leaf does not wither; And in whatever he does, he prospers. ~Psalm 1:3


As the saying goes, "Where there is water, there is life. " Certainly, our physical life begins with us floating in the waters of the wombs of our mothers before our feet ever touch Earth's dry land. As I think about the struggle that we all must endure to remain in balance another proverb-- African in origin, I think-- comes to mind: "Where there is mud, there's water." I take this to mean that even in the messiest of situations there is the opportunity to grow. Before this can happen, though, we must point our divining rod into the direction of the Source. Set out on a sojourn to get to the hammam, or better yet, the Great Stream. The place where the soul thirsty for purification and rebirth can go to be cleansed. This is one of the reasons that the idea of river baptisms, especially ones of the old south, are beautiful to me. (It made me happy to learn that one of my relatives, Aunt Ora Lee, proudly recalled being baptised in the Guadalupe River near Victoria, Texas.)

In any case, listening to the radio yesterday, I heard a Jewish-Canadian neuroscientist and author named Esther Sternberg speaking about her book The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions. The main idea that she brought forward was that at some point there was a break between the once-unified domains of science and spirituality and that the people of today are slowly accepting that the split can (and must) be mended. Her outlook could not be compactly fit into the New Age category; instead her philosophy sounded as if it were inclined toward osteopathy.

Another of the profound, yet simple things she said was that in ancient times, healing temples or sanctuaries were usually built beside fresh water sources with sloping banks. The slope made it so that people who were too ill to immerse themselves could be eased in with the help of others. A beautiful vision. During her interview Dr. Sternberg spoke often of Asklepios, the Greek god of healing (known in Egypt as Imhotep, to whom temples were dedicated in Memphis, on the west bank of the Nile River.) During the writing of her book and the healing of her body from painful arthritis, Dr. Sternberg said that she visited Greece. One of the things she did while there was visit one of Asklepios' shrines.

She did not imply that the water in and of itself had any magical properties. Simply, the idea was that something unexplainable happened-- an awareness sparked or epiphany occurred. A Jungian kind of thing, I suppose. As a result, she was able to access a power that helped move her toward healing. (Another resonant point that she mentioned was that there is a center of the brain reserved for the meditative, read: hypnotic or trance, state. This made me think of Eknath Eswaran continually pointing out the importance of the personal mantra)

As I type, another image comes to mind is that of the master teacher Yeshua/Issa/Jesus taking a moment during his secret Passover feast to bathe the feet of his disciples. Most of the time we think of this gesture as being a lesson in selfless service, humility. Could He also have been saying, "There's more where this came from." In the same way that he was but a small sample (the Son) drawn from the vast Source (the great Mother-Father), the small bowl of water that He used to perform His act of outward purification was a sample of the guaranteed mind-body-spirit healing available to the disciples if they continued to walk along what Buddhists refer to as the Enlightened Path or The Way?

Green Collar Jobs

Yesterday while driving and running errands I was listening to News and Notes on one of the NPR stations and heard an interview with a man named Van Jones who works with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Cali's Bay Area. His interview centered around a Green Collar Jobs bill that he and some others are working to push through Congress. If accepted, it will allot money to teach the poor/working class about environmentalism and train the people to work in the "green" jobs sector. He raised some really interesting points about the feasibility of the idea and the way that companies are choosing to send the majority of manual labor, blue collar jobs (once avenues that people of color took to escape poverty) to various overseas countries. Since green collar jobs are being phased out and there is such a push for all things "organic," "sustainable" and "eco-friendly"-- especially on the West Coast of the U.S. -- green jobs can occupy the place that blue collar jobs once did.

VJ also spoke about the ways that environmentalism has typically been the domain of the privileged and that they often have goals that seem abstract or remote to people who have concrete economic and health concerns related to the here and now (cuz it's all about the money, ain't a damn thing funny...). When environmentalism is "broken down," spoken about plainly (solar panels as a way to decrease grandma's electric bill, cleaning up the air so that little sis won't have to walk around with an inhaler in her pocket) it opens environmentalism up to a wider audience of people willing to work toward its ends.

Of course, I must say that this attempt to rally such interest is ironic being that most "people of color" are descended from ones for whom there was no name given to environmentalism; it was simply a way of life. Think of truck gardens from back in the day. Or Alice Walker's observations in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens about rose bushes sprucing up the weathered rural shacks. Even recently it was common to pass by housing projects and be uplifted by the sight of the container garden of a ghetto grandmama (herself a vibrant trans-PLANT from some country locale). And Latinos are still, by and large, landscapers and gardeners and migrant workers. In my neighborhood, many Latino families keep beautiful home gardens. As a matter of fact, just before I gave birth last year, I begged/bought a few tall sunflower stalks (my Oxum side couldn't help herself) from a Mexican family whose yard was filled from one end to the other with them.

In any event, there are lots of little (actually major) sidebars and environmental justice corollaries to this Green Jobs bill, the most obvious and exciting being that such training would be a benefit to the overall health of the workers, their (our) families and communities. Rather than take any more detours allow me to direct you to this Green Options Interview .

(Housing project image at top from The Welcome Project website)

Robert Farris Thompson on Daughters of the Dust

Robert Farris Thompson has some insightful things to say about Julie Dash's old film, Daughters fo the Dust. Check out this video clip as well as this fairly new interview with the filmmaker.

Greetings, I Bring

Do something. Even if it’s just a little something, they say. So here I am and here this is though I've gotta admit that I feel a bit tentative about this whole blog thing.

Still, I'm interested in taking a step in the direction of routinely making time for a bit of scribbling, something I've always paradoxically had trouble with, despite long having thought of myself as a writer. Now, though, I'm feeling especially "pressed" to maintain sight of my many interests and passions amidst all that has changed in my life, the best change being my new role as mama to an inquisitive, healthy and beautiful baby boy.

I am motivating myself to embark on this diversionary project-- an outlet for my ever (r)evolving heart and mind--by reminding myself that the missives can be as long as an essay or as short as a word, as intermittent or frequent as I’m able to manage. Choppy as mommy-thoughts can sometimes be. Diffuse, if that's how it comes out. And perhaps, on occasion, coherent and on the mark. Maybe blogs should be looked at as the metaphorical equivalent of the gym-- a place where folks go to work stuff out and get conditioned...

In any case, I might-oughtta take my buttocks to bed, since it's a quarter past three a.m. and the baby has a doctor's appointment in a few hours. More later!