Quote

There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow.

Gretel Ehrlich

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Gretel Ehrlich
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 21
Essayist
Writer
Santa Barbara
California
Many
Tree
Prejudice
Curves
Long
Grows
Begins
Distrust
Like
Causes
Wave
Racial
Working
Watching
Waves
History
Exactly
Reveal
Oscillations
Fear
Deep
Greed
Oscillation
Ends
Cause
Racism
Internment
Take
Grow
Slow
Seated

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Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.
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Between highway sounds I heard waves and thought how the curve of the coastline here had sheltered and nurtured live-born sharks, humans, and migrating whales. Here, at the edge of the continent, time and distance stopped in the lull between sets of waves I could get a fresh start.
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To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.
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The toughness I was learning was not a martyred doggedness, a dumb heroism, but the art of accommodation. I thought: to be tough is to be fragile to be tender is to be truly fierce.
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I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in.
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Walking is also an ambulation of mind.
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All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call aware--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like beauty tinged with sadness.
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Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I'm all right so far?
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A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree.
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I understood why war zones are called 'theaters' because they frame a kind of play acting or, worse, deceit, that can stain a human life forever: the deceit of hate on hearsay - hating an enemy one doesn't know.
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