Prelude to Heroes Wetland


Yellow Warbler and Heroes Wetland

Prelude: ODE TO HEROES WETLAND

                        Part 1

 

     The painting above is a portrait of Heroes Wetland in Spring, when the Warblers migrate through. Heroes Wetalnd is in a natural Bowl, nested in a sort of funneling valley a few miels from Lake Erie. It is one of the most special times of year at Heroes. The Warlbers and other migrating birds some fo them heading for canada, comes down the rivers. At Hereos they funnel into the area betweent he pond and the river. On a given day in spring one can see many warblers and migrating birds of all kinds. There are Palm, Magnolia,  Canada, Yellow, Black and White and many other kinds of Warblers. There are Northern Watertrushes, Orioles, Spotted sandpipers, Blue dn green Wing Teals and many other birds.
     The painting aboove shows this time. There is a Muskrat and her babies, as well as Canada Geese nesting. Blue Wing teals swim by and a Red Headed Woodpecker  flies over the wet land looking for insects to catch. A Yellow Warbler sits on a branch looking into the spring air. Its eye meets my eye and your eye in a recognition of the marvel of existence and being.
      This painting in some respects summarizes my 3 years at Heroes. It shows what I loved there, but it doesn't explain it. Various explanations of aspects of this painting can be found in the sections of this book and Geese, Woodpeckers and in the sections on Heroes Wetland below.  Moreover this entire website is an explanation to some degree. Each of the sections of this book helps explains the concerns of the other sections.
      My concern with human rights led me into a deeper awareness of Nature's Rights. I felt a marvelous sense of separation from the human social fabric while I lived at Heroes, much as I often felt during the 3 years I lived next to Point Reyes National Seashore. Both were times of deep searching and wonder. I came to realize that an understanding of nature's rights is the basis of human rights, and not vice versa, as we are regularly taught. Human's are not the center of the world. They are one species of many. Human's rights must be circumscribed by a concern with what nature requires.       
      At Heroes I came to realize that "all my relations" were not just human, but animal and avian, plants and water, sky and earth.  I explore this theme in the poem and painting of "All my Relations". Prior to my years at Heroes, I spent some six years in a university setting trying to extradite myself from some of the the illusions that my society had taught me, or which I had fallen into of my own accord. As I will explain in a poem below, my heart attack brought many things in the world into focus. Immediately after my heart attack I decided to return to the natural world, which had long been a central concern of my life and art in previous years.
    I went to Heroes Wetland just about everyday for a few years. Heroes Wetland is a series of ponds which I frequented and studied.  I have not told anyone except those close to me exactly where the place is. I stopped going regularly after the park system began murdering deer there. They also disturbed the water levels in the the pond, which affected the nesting of birds and killed many trees.  It astonished and disturbed me deeply to see how ignorant and harmful these park officials and biologists were. I still go there occasionally, particularly in spring, to watch the bird migration come down the Rocky River or Cuyahoga river, headed for Lake Erie and Canada.  But the idyllic period of about three years where I was closely in touch with a wild place is over  with now. Heroes is damaged. That makes the story of Heroes Wetland something of a tragic tale, I'm sorry to say. Of course, to some degree, Heroes Wetland is really a state of mind, and a way of looking at things. I carry Heroes around with me, and have found many places I could call Heroes Wetland. Any place where one learns about other species or about the needs and marvel of the natural world is 'Heroes Wetland".
I
           Ours is an age of mocking cynicism where the unsentimental kill as a matter of policy, kill barely noticing what innocence dies. Builders of Malls put up monstrous shopping centers and do not pay back the harm they do to fields. ponds, birds and trees.  When their are attempts at "mitigating" this damage, it is merely a pretence at replacement, since the damage has been done. The killers feel nothing as the small ones cry their barely audible whimperings. At Heroes Wetland I learned about many who suffer unnoticed  just outside the margins of our society. Just as millions of animals suffer horrendous suffering in factory farms processing live cattle, pigs or chickens, as bush meat, or in slaughter houses, the brutal cruelty that humans commit against wild animals is no less horrific and barbaric.  Road kills are obvious, but less obvious are all the animals, birds or fish killed by farmers, in suburbs, or by fisherman and loggers.  In this time where "terrorists" are thought to be everywhere, it would seem that the real terrorists are us. I want to tell the tale of the fragility of these beings and give voice to the beauty of these being whose unnoticed terror few turn their eyes to see and few strain to hear....

******* 

 

At Heroes Wetland I learned
about many who suffer unnoticed
just outside the margins of our society.
I saw evidence of cruelty of humans against wild animals
visited on nature by the same people
that are unaware of factory farms
and  don't want to know about processed
deaths of cattle, pigs or chickens,
bush meat,  slaughter houses---
when they eat
their beef hamburgers.
I could see the imprint on the land
of those who mock innocence
while they endorse brand names
and barely notice the deaths of children
or support killing as a matter of policy
"to protect the American Way of life".
As I get older I feel a cynical chill of
bitterness the more I watch human beings,
Are human beings  "really fit for anything
but to be stood up on the street corner
as a convenience for dogs?" Mark Twain asked
with acerbic humor.
There is some truth in the idea that dogs
are better people than humans.
I don't go as far as Robinson Jeffers,
who sometimes wanted to see them all wiped out.
I have some faith in education
but In any case,
I want to tell the tale of the fragility of non-human beings
and give voice to the beauty of these beings
whose lives go on unnoticed
just outside the ring of terror that human society creates

At Heroes, I saw beauty thriving among the defeated
I saw wonders among those who hide away
At Heroes, I learned things most humans have forgotten
Indeed, I learned things most humans have grown oblivious to.....

Look, up in the sky, a single Canada Goose flying,
dark wings above the light body, crying, crying because they mate for life
and a hunter murdered its mate, and it cries for the love it lost
flying towards Heroes Wetland.

Heroes Wetland is a secret place
threatened from just over the hilly horizon,
where many who are lost, shunned,
shut out neglected, wounded or ignored go.
I have seen injured deer go there, limping,
after being hit by a car.
One day a 3 legged deer showed up,
its lower back leg shot off by some men for fun,---
Its ligaments were still hanging from the bloody stump
and her body twisting in extreme pain ---
pain not noticed or denied by the laughing men
who harmed her.
I tried to feed and care for this deer for a few months,
her fawns still staying by her
hoping she might survive, but in the end she disappeared....
I found a part of a skeleton in the woods.

I have seen Raccoons or other birds or animals
go to Heroes to die curled up next to a log
shivering.
I fed them if they would eat
or sat with them when they slowly died.
It was every bit as painful and sad as a human death.

Every year thousands of birds show up at Heroes
finding comfort and rest after the long migration.
Some stay to mate and have babies,
some moving on after a day, hour or week.
In late March,  I saw a flock of at least ten thousand
Common Grackles flying over Heroes and alighting
 winter is.

 

Sometimes homeless people showed up at Heroes,
seeking solace near the water or in the woods---
trying to find some green luminosity
escape the soulless shoes of the streets,
streets stained with the absence of money
and the selfish iniquity of car-phones
hospitals that bankrupt families,
cars that ride on pollution.
Animals, birds and homeless people are
all battered by the same brutal ignorance
of the American dream of having more and sharing less,
where competition is thought
of as a greater value than cooperation.
Housing for poor people torn down for rich Condos.
The 1996 Welfare Reform Bill put large holes in the "safety net"
so the poor were sure to fall though the net
while the rich amass shameful fortunes. 
Welfare for Big Business increased
while the rich tore down the flop houses.
At Heroes I picked up beer bottles left by homeless men
and talked with them about why they felt safe there
eating wild onions.
I felt safe there too as did the animals and birds.

A old clown named Barnaby showed up at Heroes one day,
without his clown suit
but still dressed in the clothes of his heart
invisible mime clothes worn over a sad-faced
and tender regard for beauty and children.
I remember he had a TV show in the 1970's
in which he was a clown that tried to make children happy.
We watched Turtles and Waterbirds together
and the entwined necks of Swans.
Those who understand  the "Tramp" of Charlie Chaplin
already know allot about the recurved beauty
of the necks of Swans
and those who know the beauty of Swans
long for the cries of extinct birds
and notice all how much this society harms children.
Barnaby was sad because he spent his life
devoted to children and now an old man,
his own children did not care about him.
As long as I got mine, who cares about you, old man.
They told him.
Nature's rights are violated by selfish, irresponsible market,
a lonely clown mourns his selfish children,
old man slumped in his broken wheelchair.
Here I am at Heroes Wetland with those who are lost
with the lost,
where I belong.....

I too, in my turn, lost long ago
a child still seeking.
I found my way to Heroes
seeking shelter with the unsheltered
and finding refuge in the sanctuary
of the unprotected.
Secure only in this insecurity
Heroes is an endangered place
where what is real thrives hidden
outside the surreal and public cruelty of money.
The rules at Heroes are
that that are no rules
except the free rule of beauty of being.
I didn't have a choice really.
Heroes called out to me the first time I saw it.
I could not stay away
I love the places and beings that have no place
and take the side of those left aside
and devote myself to the memory of the forgotten.
 

But I did not get to Heroes easily.
It took me two decades or more.
For years I had carefully built a church of illusions
and nurtured it like Zen-bones made of Sufi-jewels
until one day bones and churches came crashing down
littering the ground with fool's gold and fake gems.
The question that finally led me to Heroes
came from deeper within,
from out of my childhood,
and drove me first to books
then to travel, peoples,
accredited and unaccredited teachers,
cities, religions, dead ends, philosophies,
those I love and did not love,
those who helped or hated me,
charlatans, losses, longings and  sorrows,
seeking and still seeking through landscapes and happy miseries.
     
I was driven by the question into the university.
But as helpful as it was,
the answer to my question was not the university,
which is yet another facet of the problem.
The problem is that no one cares,
most are taught not to care, but I care
and the mere fact of caring is threatening
to all those who deny anything is wrong
or anything happened. A few years ago
my rather hostile older brother asked me, incredulously---
with a disbelief that denies dignity to the lives lost--
"why would you study the atrocities of the last 500 years"?
But he did not understand I was not studying atrocities,
I was studying the hearts of those who were harmed
looking for a knowledge based on care and not power.
I was studying the human heart, the weakness and sorrows
of those who lose out in history. I do not believe in conquerors,
gods or men with power. I wanted to understand
 what is the root of this destructive culture,
and who are they, who am I and where did I come from?

Life matters more than knowledge.
The need of power is a disease.
Goya understood the horror that power creates
as he painted in silence, deaf, in the House of the Deaf Man.
What are the reasons for so much harm
being done to poor people and animals?
Why hypocrisy in high places,
why do systems of knowledge generate powerful oppressions?
and what would knowledge be if it upheld sympathy
or nature's and human rights, instead of wealth and power, as primary?

I studied the history of death and injustice,
how gods and other abstract entities are used to kill,
and transcendent "truths" bring suffering to the poor and to nature.
How to disinvest myself of the Patriarchial investment,---
 redeem myself from the the tyranny of redemption
 "cancel my subscription to the resurrection",
as Jim Morrison put it,
to be a heart-feeling-mind-alive
at last, beyond the death of philosophy.

Take Plato's "Ivory Tower" apart and give back the Ivory
to the Elephants, who alone have claim to it.
No more towers of elite intellects
I want to build a low, intimate pueblo,
as close to me as my own body,
like a bird nest-house in a garden
a house that holds people as plants
hold and are held by the earth.
No to Nietzsche and the will to power, no to capital,
no to traditional and modernist wars:
no to abstract flights of "higher" languages,
the architecture of perfect thoughts
the tyranny of mathematical utopias:
all those Edens created from corpses.
Yes to small mushrooms casting shadows on pine needles
yes to hands making pottery
yes to washing dishes and the art of goldfinch songs
Yes to protecting the weak from the strong
 to limits on power and greed.
 to a life of their own loved by all beings
living a life worth living.


Nearly at the end of my years of questioning
I woke up in the hospital after a major heart attack.
my study nearly killed me.
I tried to pull the respirator tube out of my throat
and threw up all over myself
whatever was in my stomach.
The Nurse screamed at me
"do you want to die?"
 and she pushed the tube back down my throat.
Clinically speaking I had died already
and kind nurses brought me back
though doctors claimed the credit.
As I slowly recovered under their hands,
it was hard to sleep with a tube down my throat.
I begged them to take it out
and when they did I still could not sleep.

Nightmares woke me in my bed every night
I could hear the children screaming and the women crying
and I woke up screaming "They are killing them,
leave them alone---they are killing us".
I dreamed of being freed from the concentration camps
I was on the last train to Auschwitz on the day of liberation
and felt guilty I survived.
I longed to be free of the horror of the Middle Passage,
the Trail of Tears
and the screams of Whales under the slaughtering harpoons.
Elephants were circling their babies
as the hunters and scientists started to massacre the mothers.
Millions of pigs, cows and chickens being cut up at factory farms.
They were cutting me down when they cut down the trees
White Pine and Redwood crashing down around my hospital bed.
I dreamed that the Buffalo had not been butchered on the Prairie
I dreamed of a Glass Flute Bird singing above Wounded Knee
I dreamed of multicolored leaves drifting over Nagasaki
pink flowers blooming on the hills above Hiroshima
I dreamed I saw birds nests open in Rawanda
and magic birds I never saw before flew out from the eggs.
I dreamed I gave a bowl of pure water and peeled orange slices
to a slave collapsed at the whipping post.
water dripping from his cracked lips.
His blood shot eyes were crying.
I grew afraid of the hospital bed
and started sleeping in a chair instead.
That bed was a place of death and I couldn't lie in it anymore.

The day finally came when I could touch my feet
to the ground again.
I felt the earth beneath them.
I was ecstatic.
I could walk again and my heart was weakly beating
but still beating.
I could walk and walk
and walk out of the terror of Bosgue Redondo,
out of the fear of Salt Creek,
free of the killing fields of the corporate "Adventurers"
free of the murderers of East Timor, South Africa,
Haiti, Plymouth, Potosi, Congo, Tasmania, Auschwitz, Vietnam.
No reason to feel guilty that I survived
since I carry all the dead inside me.
The faces of women in the drawings of Kathe Kollowitz
gathered around me, sad and comforting.
Maybe it's the face of my wife or my mother
or my own face, or my child's face, weeping.
All the tears turned into opals
butterflies reflected in the eyes of slaves,
luminous bird's wings over the Killing Fields.
The answer to their deaths is the love of life.
Come and lay your head down
in the green arms of being.
Yes, come now and lay your head down
in the green arms of being....

Vive la Vida
Frida Kahlo wrote on the slice of watermelon
in the last painting before she died.
Yes Long Live Life, there is nothing beyond life....
And I saw again in my mind the sorrowing ecstasy
of the suns that Vincent painted
throbbing in a landscape where I longed
for the homeless home where Vincent
sought truth in nature and in himself.
I left the hospital in my mind
before I left the building.
Birds were gliding on a blue wind.
Otters were swimming under green waters,
Redwood trees were standing in centuries of inner-peace.
My wife formed me back to health
with her warm potter's hands
her green eyes with a hint of sky blue
and sunrise in them.
Vive La Vida : Long live life.
I heard the song that Neruda sang
out of the multicolored light from within ordinary stones.
Thoreau taught me how to feel wildflowers in my arms and legs
and let them grow into my hair.
I finally knew who I was and where I was going.
Long Live Life,
Heroes Wetland was calling me
in its hidden and tiny intimacies
calling from the vast expanse
somewhere between
the Condor mountains beyond Temuco,Chile
and the ancient forests of Concord, Massachusetts
I heard it between the misty rocks of the California Coast
and the sounds of seagulls Thunder Bay and Lake Superior---
like the cry of the Pileated Woodpecker it came down
the Rivers that flow into lake Erie, The Rocky, The Chagrin
the Grand and the Cuyahoga.
From beyond the Grand Scenery
renouncing Nationalistic Vistas,
I heard the call of the small and the intimate
hardly a whisper of wind on a flower petal
barely the hint of a hum from a hummingbirds wing.
Vide La Viva, Long Live life.
 

Out of a broken heart, and the wounds in my body
and the bodies of others and the cries of
shrouded faces weeping in the dark
I awoke in the hospital on the other side of dying
and welcomed the love of caring hands
and l rested under intimate Redwoods.
Viva La Vida--
I believed that Bluebirds were standing on my head,
and "come Yellow Warbler
rest here on my fingertips"
was said by my lips
and Bears and Fox kits were sleeping beside me,
my pet Raccoon was curled on my chest
and the comfort of Owls wings
enclosed around my face.
Long Live life,
Let the ferns gather bending down above me.
Feel my breath like a green fan
wafting the air we share.
Long Live life and the breath of beauty
on the eyelids of the opening eyes of my still living heart.

My study was over and learning could begin.
The question had come from within
and drove me into and then out of the university,
into and out of the books, monasteries, cites, hospitals.
Death had taught me to give up death:
and I saw death had no face--- had no nothing,
not even something---
and I turned my back on what was not there
and walked away and I choose living
and the answer---for a time--- was Heroes Wetland.
Long Live Life.

Part 2:
 On Whether or Not I Should Share my Experiences at Heroes with Others


I have not told anyone except my wife and a few others
where Heroes wetland is.
There are no signs that point to it
and if there were, those who love the place
me included, would take it down
or point it in the wrong direction.
Anyone who claims to know where it is is mistaken.
Heroes is a place just beyond the dim consciousness
of the need to possess and collect,
just over the plowed and mowed hill of the need to own,
just beyond the boxed-in awareness that drives in cars
enslaved in the matrix of mirages
echoing from radio and TV, cell phone and computer.
It is just beyond the air conditioned mind control
of marketing and sales
just outside the invisible prison of cyberspace.
90% of the wetlands have been destroyed in
California and Ohio
and Heroes is a hidden wetland barely safe
from the macadam delusions of developers.
Rumors of hunters and land abusers
whisper all around the hills
but they have not arrived yet.
I know they plot destruction
and will eventually destroy my fragile and delicate Heroes
with greedy "improvements".
All ready the trees are dying,
and the red headed woodpeckers are leaving
and they have murdered my beloved deer.....

Those who approach Heroes with a desire to kill or own
will never find or experience its wonders.
Whoever knows where and what Heroes Wetland is
knows to keep it secret and
will do all they can to protect it
from those who would harm it.
Heroes Wetland is not just a place,
but a state of mind
----invisible to those who lack a generous heart,
sympathy and a receptive mind----
Heroes is a nation without borders
outside the blighted wastes of human hubris
a country of concern that honors what most humans deny,
abuse, forget, neglect.
It is only visible to those who have
regained the innocence of their own eyes
unclouded  their minds of what
they were taught not to see
and opened themselves to the remembrance
of what they already knew as children
and need not have forgotten.

I have grown my secret life
as birds grow nests,
as red trillium
grows a scarlet blossom
hidden deep in the forest.
Even in the face of a dangerous human world,
in the face of so many  threats,
in the face of those who tell lies
to mask malicious greed with false compassion:
one must declare one's love.
Even,
in the end---
and we all soon come
to the end of our short lives,
secrets are senseless,
and the hidden good must be revealed
and that those who would do harm,
and live merely to do harm,
are merely a flash in the eye of hate
a mirror that shatters back
into the malicious  face of power---
a smoke that lifts and reveals
that life was never an illusion,
and the pain you endured was not vain
and the eyes of animals that see you
and the eyes of those you love
are what is real and what matters.
Ask them to give you courage.
And let your love of beauty be your just revenge,
and your love of beauty be your shield and shoulder.

Hope is a sapphire bird I see
a secret, ultramarine bird, an Indigo Bunting
flying all night long,
under a starry sky
on wings of Cerulean
seeking the bluest star.
Its beauty is born of its desire
to return home, and find a nesting
place where it began---
new existence giving birth to flight
from a self-contained egg,
Her deepest secrets maturing into live births.
I invite you into my eggs of dreams
my nest of secrets
my little birds born of flesh
and feathered to fly with real hopes.

For too long I have been afraid
and, like a shy mime ashamed
kept my garden of secrets behind a wall---
afraid to be known---
but they have overgrown me
and I'm tearing the walls down
and letting my mind go to seed and wild.
I'm tired of hiding these nectar secrets deep in the forest
nurturing my hidden butterflies.
I have a fire that does not burn
a candle of blue, yellow and red flames
that sometimes dreams a night of violets---
sometimes it's the green fire of nature's light---
 a firefly light of radiant growth.
I want to carry my many-colored candles
into the tree tops
and signal my dreaming flames
 over the toxic landscape
and help create a world worth living in
growing back into hope of health.

So yes, I will try to share my love of this place.
At Heroes the Red Squirrel nurtures her four babies
in an egg shaped chamber in her secret cavern,
in a birthing cavity of a dead Beech tree.
The tree is dead but it is still mothering
squirrels and downy woodpeckers.
By late May the baby squirrels are grown
enough that they crawl out of the womb of secrets
and clamber over each other up and down
the branches of the Beech tree, curious and quickened
and playing in the wonders of a fragile world.
I invite you to my Beech tree, my place of secrets,
the world of beings that I love.....

Copyright © 2002-7 Mark Koslow. All Rights Reserved.