Sarah Palin has become the new poster girl for the Religious Right. Every time anyone attacks her policies, beliefs, or experience, the McCain crowd screams, “sexist.” I abhor sexism, but questioning the suitability of Sarah Palin’s political ambitions isn’t sexist. It’s essential.

In my newsletter this month, I compare Sarah Palin to Vandana Shiva, a physicist,  activist, and founder of Navdanya International. Navdanya is a word meaning “nine seeds” and it represents a commitment to biological and cultural diversity. When asked what the nine seeds are, Vandana Shiva responds, “What naturally grows best in your region of the world.”

Sarah Palin, in direct contrast, is about monoculture. She supports big corporations, big religion, big money. She plays up the feminine virtues of caring for family, but she happily ignores the well-being of  families that don’t meet her criteria. Her religious beliefs are exclusive: paradise for the few and not the all. And her speech at the Republican convention was all about putting others down.

In the spirit of the sacred feminine––the great-hearted mother––let’s follow Vandana Shiva’s advice and plant nine seeds according to our inner knowing. Seeds of love and hope. Seeds of forgiveness and fierceness. Seeds that honor diversity and defend the rights of nature. What seeds will you plant?

Many of you may have heard that honeybees worldwide are disappearing at an alarming rate. While there is no consensus as to the cause, one hypothesis is that the bees have literally been worked to death. Carted from orchard to orchard, exposed to pesticides and the roar of the freeway, taken from their homes and their neighborhoods to pollinate distant crops, they are on the brink of collapse.

How many of us feel the same way? How many exhausted factory workers and white collar managers feel overwhelmed and over tired? How many of us would like to escape the hive and just disappear, if only for a while?

If the honeybees vanish entirely life on this planet as we know it is over. What can the honeybees tell us about the way we’re ruthlessly exploiting the land, the people, and all species upon it — before it’s too late? And what would it be like if we began by honoring relaxation as part of our own daily lives?

Realizing that the wounds of the world are the wounds of the human soul, we begin to see that the natural world is a reflection of our own inner nature. And that all change begins from within.

Lament for a Meadow

In winter it is mossy green, in summer the tawny shade of mountain lion. It harbors deer and birds, and a creek that spills down one side like a first communion veil. It is the place owls hunt for mice and families of deer graze by moonlight. It is a haven for hawks and briefly, in spring, for popsicle-bright California poppies.

It’s the place I’ve watched a rider and horse spin figure eights through the long snake grasses and imagined myself in the wilds of Montana. It’s the place I’ve seen a newborn deer bouncing up and down on spindly legs, stopping every few seconds to glance at his mother as if to say, “Look at me!” And once I gazed for ages as a bobcat played and pounced in the sunlight. When another women joined me, though strangers, we hugged each other because our sense of wonder was too much to contain alone. 

Musing on the Magic

For over six years now this meadow has greeted me as I arrive home to Pacheco Valley where I live in Novato, California. It has been a breezy bulwark between my home and the throaty roar of the freeway.  In its presence, I have remembered to breathe, relax, pause.

And now they are going to bury it under yet another strip mall.

We cannot take our special places for granted. We need to learn how to protect them. For these places fill us, inspire us, even set the course for our lives. What places are important to you? What sacred spots give your life meaning? When all is said and done, a meadow is never just a meadow.

I’ve never been a birdwatcher–a bird listener, yes; snuggling under my sheets on cool spring mornings delighting in the dawn chorus. And, I confess, I have always stopped to stare at hummingbirds. But a birdwatcher? Or as the British say, a twitcher? Never. Until, that is, I recently spent two weeks in The Gambia in West Africa.

Birds by the bushel

An astonishing 540 species have been recorded in this sliver of a country that flows like a misfit stream between the upper and lower portions of Senegal. Above the red clay earth and majestic baobab trees, in sleepy mangroves and thick forests, birds gather in dazzling profusion. The krrrrrrr oo-OO, oo, ooOO cries of the African mourning doves and the nattering of glossy starlings sporting curlicue tails stir the sultry air. Overhead, blue-bellied rollers flash under-wings of brilliant turquoise and the largest heron in the world lifts over the creeks like an unfurled umbrella.The birds of Gambia are surprising. But my experience of watching them more so.

Inhabiting our lives

Imagine walking in a steamy gallery forest along the banks of a river. It’s too hot to stride fast, and the trees press in making progress slow. I hear rustles, squawks, shaking branches. Fallen fruits assail my nostrils with sweetness. I sense animals all around me, but all I see are leaves, choking vines and massive palm fronds so sharp they can slice through flesh.I stop to bird watch. I inhale the smell of fungus and become attuned to the surrounding susurrus. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a bird the color of mustard. A red bill fire finch hops from branch to branch. Minutes pass.Monitor lizards, red colobus monkeys, fleet-footed Gambian sun squirrels and confetti-bright birds begin to emerge from the canopy. Over my left shoulder on a wide branch a vervet monkey grooms its child.  My breath slows, stills. By waiting and watching, I have allowed the forest to find me.

Christian Wiman, Editor of Poetry Magazine writes: “Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”  We go to bird watching for the same reason.Bird watching teaches us to fully inhabit the world by learning how to pay attention to it. What we come to see and know intimately we are less likely to destroy.

My friend Bill Carney will ask me for all the names of the birds I saw. I will give him my list, but many of the names will escape me. What I won’t forget is the peacefulness that flooded me as I sat quietly befriending this new landscape and its inhabitants. Like a mother first setting eyes on her newborn child, I was filled with awe that life can be so extravagantly, improbably beautiful.

Years ago on a rafting trip down the Klamath River our guide–a Native American of the Paiute tribe–told the group, “This is my land - the land of my people.”  He talked about the valleys and mountain peaks his land encompassed, describing them as the center of his world. Then he asked, “Where is the center of your world?”

By that time I had lived in London; gone to boarding school in Surrey, and university in Sussex; lived in New York, San Francisco, London (again); and even the South of France. I had no idea where the center of my world was. In fact, the whole idea of being deeply connected to the land was foreign to me.Perhaps that’s why our guide’s question haunted me more and more as time passed. We are increasingly alone, more disconnected, more insulated than at any other time in our histories. It used to be that we needed the tribe and the bounty of the local land in order to survive. Now we can feed and shelter ourselves working alone at our computers. Indeed, this is what I have done for most of my life.

Independence versus Interdependence

But even a gypsy like me begins to long for a sense of belonging. The older I get, the more the desire to plant myself in a particular community takes hold. I want to find that place–that eco-system and social system–where my particular purpose can flourish and bloom.In 2001, my husband and I settled in Pacheco Valley in Novato, California. Over the years we’ve come to know the ways of the wild turkeys and white-tailed deer. We’ve worried over the creeks in the dry years and welcomed their splashy exuberance in the rainy ones. We’ve come to recognize many of the sellers at our local farmers market, and made friends living close by. Gradually, we two wandering souls are coming to be a part of our community, a part of our small portion of the planet.I confess: every once in a while my husband and I are still overcome with a longing to pack up and go. My Romany ancestors are not silent. But there is a sweetness about gathering a life to one’s self that I am beginning to  appreciate. Like a tree covered with thick moss, almost despite myself, I am starting to look settled–a part of the scenery.