Words of the Watershed Volume 1
Table of contents
Jashvina Devadoss
/explore/write about how it fits into the Berkeley urban environment. What is “urban” about it, how does the “urban” manifest in your place? What is not “urban”? How might you re-imagine this place? You may find it helpful to think about your own personal definition of urban and your own vision for the modern urban environment. What does it mean to our city that we can have this beautiful grove in the hills? How does that change our city? How does it change us? From the top of my mother tree, I can see out into the Bay. Even as my limbs twine around hers, even in that intimacy of touch, my ears remind me of the Bay. I cannot forget the Bay with her, cannot separate her from this place. I found her the autumn before last, in desperate longing for my home, my sweet green mountain named after my town. I’d left it the day after my eighteenth birthday, full of love for my home and excitement for what was to come. I immersed myself in the Bay upon coming, touching and tasting all the colorful life in this new place. But every so often, my new urban environment would become too much, and I would be overcome with longing for Idaho. I’d run around in the hills for hours trying to soothe my heart, trying to connect with the “natural” world that I had grown to depend on, a world that had become of essence to life. It was on one such eight-hour romp in the hills that I found my mother tree at the top of a ridge, with hundreds of sisters and brothers and gorgeously lush undergrowth. I touched her bark, easily swinging my limbs through her limbs to the fullness of her great stature, and there I lay in her arms. She embraced me as her child; the feeling of her body against mine calmed my wild, hurting heart. It is she and those like her that allow me to live in the Bay. I came from mountains, and because of this, it is my ability to see the Bay from above that allows me to make sense of it; it is the “natural” that allows my life in the urban. …. I remember early, early summer mornings in Berkeley, the air like cool, clean milk on my skin (and isn’t that another dichotomy, that I have known warm milk fresh from cows that nuzzled and licked my body, yet my first thought of milk is in its refrigerated, pasteurized form?) I remember hearing the creak of trees swaying in a forest for the first time and knowing that sound from hardwood floors, oh my chagrin, my great shame at that association. I remember my love Noor going camping for the first time, just last year, voice full of joy, “Jash! I loved it just as you said I would!” Then she told me about being surrounded by trees and hearing a whooshing, a great wind-sound she knew from cars. “I didn’t realize…I didn’t realize it was actually the sound of the wind in the trees.” My heart dropped, and a quick intake of breath accompanied my sadness for her life-experience, for my beautiful Noor to have known the wind by way of cars, and not by way of trees. Yet, of course this is so. She grew up in Los Angeles. How can I blame her for that? How can she blame herself for that? We are our environments.
We come from a place of separation, of distances, and must go from there to the immediate, to the close, to the (dare I say it?) natural. I, with my thoughts of milk, with more meditation on and interaction with the fresh warm cow tongues licking, will know milk in warm closeness instead of from a distance of sterilization and preservation, of pasteurization and
Here
Go to your place and think
Here
refrigeration. I have known the creaking of trees in a forest enough to hear that sound for what it is, live tree bodies feeling wind and gravity, and some days when my feet touch certain spots in wood floors, my mind jumps that separation and I think of live tree bodies in the wind. There are places of transition, places in between, encounters that invite us into the intimacy of the natural. That brings me back to the milk, the cool clean early summer morning air milk on my skin. It was just this summer, when I lived close to two loves, and saw them every day. I was walking from my love’s blue house to my own at half-past four in the morning, and as I passed my love’s wooden shingled house, I saw three graceful brown bodies in his garden, a family, perhaps. It was so quiet that I could hear the crunch of their teeth on green leaves. They saw me watching them; their alert, delicate, strong heads lifted up towards me. I looked and looked at them as they looked and looked at me. Minutes passed in that long silent looking moment. … Marshall Berman, in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air talks about the boulevard in nineteenth century Paris, how the boulevards split open impoverished inner-city Parisian neighborhoods, spilling out the urban poor to see and be seen by the rest of Paris for the first time. For the first time, the socioeconomic classes of Paris had a space in which to interact with one another. In Baudelaire’s Eyes of the Poor, two lovers eating in a café are forced to see and be seen in the eyes of a poor family. In the encounter made possible by the new, open urban space, the narrator sees himself through the eyes of the poor and feels ashamed of himself and his lover with their “glasses and decanters, too big for [their] thirst.” She expresses disgust for the poor family, which in turn leads him to feel hatred for her. Berman argues that the personal acts of modern men and women are no longer merely personal, but must also be political- “from this moment on, the boulevard will be as vital as the boudoir in the making of modern love.” Our relations to others and ourselves and our corresponding actions stem from the encounters we have in our environments. For this reason, Berman argues for modernism in the streets, for a vision of cities founded on open, democratic spaces. I believe urbanism with spaces like my mother tree provides the same sort of encounter, an encounter with oppressed, too-often-forgotten life. It brings this life into view and gives us a pause akin to that of the man who looks again at the café he sits in and finds in it only a celebration of gluttony. The deer come down to the city and remind us of “other” life. The trees in the canyon cannot move, but by their existence, we have a space in which to interact with them, and it is only because of this space that the deer can come into the city to see and be seen by us. The encounters made possible by this space allow us to “jump the separation;” they bring into our consciousness life and systems of life not entirely in human control. This is an intimacy, and perhaps a more honest one than that experienced in untouched (or less-touched) places. It allows these worlds to coexist, the natural and the urban. These spaces allow us to be urban beings and still value life and systems of life not completely under our rule. Our encounters with urban natural spaces lead us to put greater value on natural spaces, and that, in turn, begins to inform and define our actions as urban people. I believe our encounters with the natural world have the power to transform and redefine our politics. And in a world where a greater portion of the population live in urban environments than do in rural, I say: Bring on the urban wild.
Nicole Wong To live here to sit here on a wooden bench wrinkled from holding in the sun Here where the earth stops moving because I stop moving, no need to smile to myself to prove that I am this bench unflickeringly still, steadfast light travels, and has its own rays, its own thoughts; After leaving here, I tread through pavement stages but I am lying down, quietly looking up from soft soil. This garden like a stroller beneath my feat, this garden where I acknowledge the day like the leaves illuminate the wind
Here
Alive