The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Charles Knott

Last year we announced a festival of poetry and began collecting poems of many kinds, with special attention to praise poems, posting them all year as gestures of creativity, hoping to lessen the growing gloom in personal and social reactions resulting from isolation and the spread of sickness and death by Covid and from a world afflicted by the disease of politics. This year we are hopeful that creative thinking along with vaccines will continue to lead us toward greater health and more happiness, even as political turmoil goes on polluting our global atmosphere.

Our salon features in this issue include poems in Presentations focusing on environment and seasons by Jonathan Knott, Charles Knott, Barbara Knott, and Dianne Seaman. Charles contributes the poem on this front page about one of our trees, a sycamore, photographed by Jonathan and celebrated (along with many other trees) by Barbara in a poem called "Pulse of This Place." Some of Jonathan's poems in Presentations also focus on our immediate environment, as does Charles' attention (in his essay) to resident buzzards. In his column Entertaining Ideas, Charles Knott looks in detail at James Hillman's book Dreaming Animals. In Views and Reviews, Barbara introduces two books: J. Allen Boone's Kinship With All Life and Rosemary Daniell's The Murderous Sky: Poems of Madness and Mercy.

Nancy Law continues to bring us accounts of her adventures in and around the Atlanta area, often accompanied by her family. In Why We Love Atlanta, she recounts a family Christmas outing to take in the Van Gogh immersive experience made available here last year. In Around Town, she recounts and shows visual proof of another outing to another immersive experience, this one underground and focused on the folks from Alice in Wonderland. Laurie Ann, part of the family and one of our Muses, tells us about a strange and interesting character she meets up with while "running for her life." Muses sandy mason (aka Sandy Mason) and Katherine Miller keep us supplied with intriguing photos like Kathy's record of the full moon and Sandy's video of hula hooping at night with fires on her hoop.

Charles Knott takes us on an adventure through a lifetime of theatrical experiences in his column Reflections. Incidentally, Leonard Cohen steps out of our Museum long enough to laugh at Jonathan Knott's rendition (on his artist page) of a poem about some dogs (ours, now passed) to be sung to the tune of Cohen's "Suzanne."And Bill Kennedy, welcome back into our community of writers!

We are saddened to announce the death last year of our beloved friend Ravi Kumar, former host of World Voices. We are heartened to place Ravi's memorial tribute in our Museum and to have Jonathan (now in charge of the Museum) move also into Ravi's role as host of World Voices. He has placed, in tribute to Ravi's homeland India, a piece I wrote earlier about Lord Krishna, one of the great world voices discovered when, as the story goes, his mother was enticed to look into his open mouth and see the whole world there. In Jonathan's column Tracking History, he has elected to look into the past from the past by publishing a long poem called "Some Things Are Sacred" written by yours truly in 2011 and presented in a reading at Atlanta's Cafe Medusa the following year. It is about the world of art and soul and the political turmoil of that time, using the film Dr. Zhivago as a point of departure for discussion.

We continue to collect poems from around the world, both for our great pleasure and in trust that poetry moves us in the right direction for a sustaining, fulfilling life. We are reluctant to ask for a return to normal, given other dangers in our normal way of living before Covid gave us pause. I am referring, of course, to the steady erosion of our planet's resources, along with the near extinction of certain plant and animal species and the depletion of more. Our relationship with our world needs more attention than we've given it, and I hope that we are many instead of few who now care about the earth, the elements, and the plants and animals, of which we humans are only one species. The Dublin Diary column features a reminiscence with photographs by Linda Ibbotson of the December 2015 Abroad Writers Conference in Dublin where Jonathan and I met so many interesting fellow writers and explored our ancestral land.

My own experience of the past year has included more reading than socializing, and I am happy to have made my way into the company of many writers who are in one way or another connected to the movement toward depth econlgy, from Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau to John Muir, Thomas Berry, William Plotkin, and David Abram. My love of poetry goes hand in hand with those who understand that the best kind of life is lived poetically, in harmony with the natural world that provides so much of poetic imagery, from pictures to metaphors and symbols. All nature poets, going back to the Romantic period of Shelley and Wordsworth, belong to this tradition. Nowadays, in particular, Mary Oliver holds close to nature in every line of every poem, it seems. Poet David Whyte as well as mythologist Michael Meade, among others including poet Robert Bly who died recently, provide rich depth ecology learning experiences in their collected writings and presentations now available on Internet.

For several years before and for many years after I wrote my Master's thesis on D. H. Lawrence's concept of quickness, I found his work consistently relevant to my interests and studies. Recently, I picked up Dolores La Chapelle's book D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive from my bookshelf and was reminded that Lawrence discusses The Grapevine's present themes at length. La Chapelle points out (pp. 173-4) that Lawrence, in his essay "New Mexico," provides "a lyrical description of the movement which Arne Naess defined more than fifty years later as Deep Ecology." She goes on to illustrate his lyricism:

"For the whole life-effort of man [is] to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy." The goal is to blossom. He says this (p. 130): "Blossoming means the establishing of a pure, new relationship with all the cosmos." Lawrence's views were strongly influenced by three long visits when he actually lived in Taos, New Mexico, on a ranch given him by Mabel Dodge Luhan. In exchange, he gave her the manuscript to Sons and Lovers. He regarded his time in New Mexico as the greatest experience he ever had in the outside world and one that changed him forever. Significantly, he was laid to rest in this environment at the Taos ranch, now a memorial site.

Another important mentor is Carl Jung, whose contribution to discussion of these themes can be found collected in a book by Meredith Sabina called The Earth has a Soul: C. G. Jung on Nature, Technology, and Modern Life (2002), where she quotes Jung's view, "Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul." Jung's travels included a trip to Taos in 1925, where he was introduced to Pueblo Indian chief Ochway Biano (translated as Mountain Lake). The meeting revealed a powerful sense of kinship with nature among the indigenous people of this tribe. Jung reported later that he felt spiritually "down at the heels" in the man's company as he listened to their belief that white men are crazy because they think with the head instead of the heart, and to the Pueblo belief that through their ritual dances, they help the sun each day to cross the sky.

Charles and I traveled to Taos in 1966, where we met painter John Manchester who introduced us to another artist, Dorothy Brett, then in her eighties, who had arrived there with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda many years earlier in the mid-1920s. John and Brett made it possible for Charles and me to meet Ochway Biano as Lawrence and Jung had, many years earlier. Needless to say, it was strange and interesting to spend time with him, to feel his connection to the world and his strong sense of the important role his people were playing as caretakers of our environment.

We became good friends with Dorothy Brett and corresponded with her for years before her own demise. Significantly, she recommended that we read a small book called Kinship with All Life by J. Allen Boone (see Views and Reviews), where so many of the ideas related to ecotherapy had been laid out for reflection decades before it took on its present urgency.

While there have been intimations of awareness for more than a century that the human race is gowing more and more distant from connection to the fertile soil that serves the soul, only recently have the voices of awareness and protest increased to form a chorus loud enough to resound throughout the world. You are invited to add your own voice by visiting our Facebook page and by tagging our page with your own posts, as well as to write your own poems and commentaries and send them to us via my email address, bknott11@yahoo.com, with the word Grapevine on the subject line. Anyone who wishes to reach out to one of our contributors can find that person on a Facebook page for messaging or send a note to my email as given.

With thanks for all your contributions to helping the sun cross the sky each day,

Barbara

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