Eve Ensler's extraordinary letter to Mother Earth, an illustrated alphabet of joy, and a love letter to walking

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Dear {NAME}, welcome to this week's edition of the [brainpickings.org]( newsletter by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Iris Murdoch on how nature and art allow us to "unself," Ursula K. Le Guin's playful and poignant letter-poem about why we read, and a life-straw — you can catch up [right here](. And if you are enjoying this labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – for thirteen years, I have been spending innumerable hours and tremendous resources on it each week, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [Losing the Birds, Finding the Words: Eve Ensler’s Extraordinary Letter of Apology to Mother Earth]( [theapology_eveensler.jpg?fit=320%2C473]( “Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” the visionary marine biologist and lyrical author Rachel Carson wrote as she was making ecology a household word and getting ready to awaken the modern environmental conscience with her [epoch-making book Silent Spring](. Silent Spring was titled after the book’s most chilling chapter, detailing the gruesome mass deaths of songbirds in pesticide-assaulted habitats, inspired by a verse from a classic ballad of heartbreak by Carson’s favorite poet, John Keats — “The sedge is withered from the lake, / And no birds sing!” — for she saw no greater heartbreak than the deadly silencing of Mother Nature. In her [bittersweet farewell to the world]( — Carson never lived to see her work inspire the creation of Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency — she beckoned posterity, beckoned us, to face our “grave and sobering responsibility [which] is also a shining opportunity”; to “go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.” [vanishing_birds-1.jpg?resize=680%2C357] Image via the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We have failed to rise to her challenge. We have failed our origins and our very humanity. In the decades since Carson’s death, [3 billion birds have vanished](. Just vanished. And as species seem to be falling off the face of the Earth, their names are [falling out of the dictionary, out of our consciousness, out of children’s imaginations](. If [“finding the words is another step in learning to see,”]( then losing the words is ceasing to see — a willful blindness to our own responsibility, which thrusts us blindfolded on the steep and winding path to redemption. Playwright, activist, and [V-Day]( founder Eve Ensler — who is perhaps as close as an artist can get to being a cultural superhero: redeemer of the unspeakable, voice of the unspoken, instrument not only of social change but of that [“revelation in the heart”]( (to borrow Leonard Cohen’s lovely phrase) where all change begins — lifts the blindfold in an extraordinary letter of apology to Mother Earth. Ensler composed the letter as an addendum of sorts to her altogether magnificent book [The Apology]( ([public library]( read it at [Bioneers]( then kindly granted me the honor of premiering it to the Brain Pickings ecosystem. [thelostwords7.jpg] Art by Jackie Morris from [The Lost Words]( by Robert Macfarlane Ensler contextualizes her courageous self-inspection in the disquieting mirror of personal responsibility, where any atonement must begin: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]After I finished writing The Apology, a book in which I wrote a letter from my father to myself apologizing and exploring, explaining in detail all the ways he had abused and harmed me, I realized there was an apology I needed to make — an apology that would force me to confront my deepest sorrow, guilt and shame, an apology that I had been avoiding since I moved out of the city to the woods where I now live with the oaks, locust and weeping willows, Lydia the snapping turtle, running spring water, foxes, deer, coyotes, bears and cardinals and my precious dog, Pablo. It is my offering to you. It is my apology to the Earth, herself. The letter, consonant with Whitman’s insistence that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” evocative of Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem [“Please Call Me by My True Names,”]( is a masterwork of empathy, that highest measure of consciousness. Its gift is the selfsame gift for which the Trappist monk and teacher Thomas Merton thanked Rachel Carson in his [gorgeous letter of appreciation]( after reading Silent Spring — the gift of civilizational self-awareness. [eveensler.jpg?resize=680%2C302] Eve Ensler (Photograph: Paula Allen) Ensler writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Dear Mother, It began with the article about the birds, the 2.9 billion missing North America birds, the 2.9 billion birds that disappeared and no one noticed. The sparrows, black birds, and swallows who didn’t make it, who weren’t ever born, who stopped flying or singing or making their most ingenious nests, who didn’t perch or peck their gentle beaks into moist black earth. It began with the birds. Hadn’t we even commented in June, James and I that they were hardly here? A kind of eerie quiet had descended. But later they came back. The swarms of barn swallows and the huge ravens landing on the gravel one by one. I know it was after hearing about the birds, that afternoon I crashed my bike. Suddenly falling, falling, unable to prevent the catastrophe ahead, unable to find the brakes or make them work, unable to stop the falling. I fell and spun and realized I had already been falling, that we have been falling, all of us, and crows and conifers and ice caps and expectations — falling and falling and I wanted to keep falling. I didn’t want to be here to witness everything falling, missing, bleaching, burning, drying, disappearing, choking, never blooming. I didn’t want to live without the birds or bees and sparkling flies that light the summer nights. I didn’t want to live with hunger that turned us feral or desperation that gave us claws. I wanted to fall and fall into the deepest, darkest ground and be finally still and buried there. But Mother, you had other plans. The bike landed in grass and dirt and bang, I was ten-years-old, fallen in the road, my knees scraped and bloody. And I realized that even then nature was something foreign and cruel, something that could and would hurt me because everything I had ever known or loved that was grand and powerful and beautiful became foreign and cruel and eventually hurt me. Even then I had already been exiled, or so I felt, forever cast out of the forest. I belonged with the broken, the contaminated, the dead.  Maybe it was the sharp pain in my knee and elbow, or the dirt embedded in my new jacket, maybe it was the shock or the realization that death was preferable to the thick tar of grief coagulated in my chest, or maybe it was just the lonely rattling of the spokes of the bicycle wheel still spinning without me. Whatever it was. It broke. It broke. I heard the howling.  Mother, I am the reason the birds are missing. I am the cause of salmon who cannot spawn and the butterflies unable to take their journey home. I am the coral reef bleached death white and the sea boiling with methane. I am the millions running from lands that have dried, forests that are burning or islands drowned in water.  I didn’t see you, Mother. You were nothing to me. My trauma-made arrogance and ambition drove me to the that cracking pulsing city. Chasing a dream, chasing the prize, the achievement that would finally prove I wasn’t bad or stupid or nothing or wrong. Oh my Mother, what contempt I had for you. What did you have to offer that would give me status in the market place of ideas and achieving? What could your bare trees offer but the staggering aloneness of winter or greenness I could not receive or bear. I reduced you to weather, an inconvenience, something that got in my way, dirty slush that ruined my overpriced city boots with salt. I refused your invitation, scorned your generosity, held suspicion for your love. I ignored all the ways we used and abused you. I pretended to believe the stories of the fathers who said you had to be tamed and controlled — that you were out to get us.  I press my bruised body down on your grassy belly, breathing me in and out. I have missed you, Mother. I have been away so long. I am sorry. I am so sorry.  I am made of dirt and grit and stars and river, skin, bone, leaf, whiskers and claws. I am a part of you, of this, nothing more or less. I am mycelium, petal pistil and stamen. I am branch and hive and trunk and stone. I am what has been here and what is coming. I am energy and I am dust. I am wave and I am wonder. I am an impulse and an order. I am perfumed peonies and the single parasol tree in the African savannah. I am lavender, dandelion, daisy, dahlia, cosmos, chrysanthemum, pansy, bleeding heart and rose. I am all that has been named and unnamed, all that has been gathered and all that has been left alone. I am all your missing creatures, all the sweet birds never born. I am daughter. I am caretaker. I am fierce defender. I am griever. I am bandit. I am baby. I am supplicant. I am here now, Mother. I am yours. I am yours. I am yours.  Eve Ensler Complement with [“After Silence”]( — Neil Gaiman’s stunning poem celebrating Rachel Carson’s legacy and culture-shifting courage — and Ensler on [how a tree saved her life]( then visit Cornell University’s [Ornithology Lab]( to see what you, my fellow naked ape, can do to help save the birds, whose salvation is inseparable from our own. For, in the poetic words of the naturalist John Muir — one of Carson’s great heroes — [“when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which for thirteen years has remained free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [Roar Like a Dandelion: Beloved Children’s Book Author and Poet Ruth Krauss’s Lost Alphabet of Joy, Illustrated]( [roarlikeadandelion.jpg?fit=320%2C383]( “Her lovely and original poetry has a flexibility that allowed me the maximum of space to execute my fantasy variations on a Kraussian theme,” Maurice Sendak wrote of the great children’s book author and poet Ruth Krauss (July 25, 1901–July 10, 1993), with whom he collaborated on [two]( [of]( the loveliest, tenderest picture-books of all time. A quarter century after the end of Krauss’s long life, lost fragments of her [daring]( poetic imagination coalesced into a manuscript that alighted to the desk of one of the great picture-book artists of our own time: [Sergio Ruzzier](. The resulting collaboration, across lines of space and time and life and death, is the wondrously imaginative [Roar Like a Dandelion]( ([public library]( the dedication of which, penned by Ruzzier in a spirit of creative kinship and reverence, reads simply: “To Maurice.” [D.jpg?resize=680%2C816]( [roarlikeadandelion22.jpg?resize=680%2C449]( Though structured as an ABC book, in a succession of short sentences each beginning with a consecutive letter of the alphabet, the book is rather an alphabetic catalogue of Krauss’s quirky, free-spirited, infinitely playfully, subtly profound prescriptions for joy and existential contentment. [L.jpg?resize=680%2C816]( [F.jpg?resize=680%2C815]( [roarlikeadandelion25.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [J.jpg?resize=680%2C408]( [I.jpg?resize=680%2C816]( “Vote for yourself,” Krauss urges under V, as a Ruzzier piglet is seen pledging allegiance to herself — that ultimate act of self-respect, the pillar of character. [roarlikeadandelion30.jpg?resize=680%2C430]( “Roar like a dandelion,” she exhorts in the line that lent the book its title, which sits like a Zen koan, to be contemplated from a thousand directions before it can be cracked, suggesting maybe that the mightiest roar is the silent roar; maybe that anger is corrosive to its host, for if a dandelion were indeed to roar, it would blow up its own delicate seedhead and lose all of its fluffy white parachutes of hope; maybe that the dandelion’s yellow burst of blossom, so plentiful if we only pay attention, is nature’s primal scream of joy. [roarlikeadandelion28.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( “Make music,” Krauss beckons in consonance with Sendak, who [ardently believed]( that the making of music is the profoundest and most primitive expression of our intrinsic nature. [M.jpg?resize=680%2C408]( Page after page, letter by letter, Ruzzier’s sweet, and stubborn creatures leap and tumble along the lines of Krauss’s imagination with their joyous, mischievous magic. [roarlikeadandelion21.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [roarlikeadandelion23.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [roarlikeadandelion29.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [U.jpg?resize=680%2C408]( [roarlikeadandelion26.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [roarlikeadandelion27.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( [roarlikeadandelion20.jpg?resize=680%2C437]( Complement with Ruzzier’s charming meta-ode to the joy of reading, [This Is Not a Picture Book]( and Krauss’s [final collaboration with Sendak]( then delight in two other unusual and imaginative alphabet books: [Daytime Visions]( celebrating the whimsy of words, and [Take Away the A]( exploring the magic of how we make meaning. Illustrations courtesy of Sergio Ruzzier; photographs by Maria Popova [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Why We Walk: A Manifesto for Peripatetic Empowerment]( [flaneuse.jpg?fit=320%2C480]( “Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Thoreau exulted as he [championed the spirit of sauntering]( in an era when the activity was largely a male privilege — for a woman, these everyday crusades meant the dragging of long skirts across inhospitable terrains, before unwelcome gazes. It would take a century and a half of bold women [conquering the mountains]( and [reimagining the streets]( before Rebecca Solnit could compose her [exquisite manifesto for wanderlust]( reclaiming walking as an activity that vitalizes the mind — the mind that, in the landmark assertion of the seventeenth-century French philosopher François Poullain de la Barre, “has no sex.” Lauren Elkin brings some of these women and their emancipatory, culture-shifting legacy to life in [Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London]( ([public library]( — a celebration of the peripatetic foot as an instrument of the mind, an insurgency, a liberation, drawing on the novels and diaries of titanic writers like Virginia Woolf and George Sand, who wove walking into their lives and works as a central theme of empowerment and active curiosity, and on her own diaries and memories as an expatriate in Paris and Tokyo, a traveler in Venice and London, a student in New York. [shauntan_grimm4.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Art by Shaun Tan for [a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales](. The title itself is a rebellion against and a recouping of the French word flâneur, masculine for “one who wanders aimlessly,” popularized in the first half of the twentieth century. Elkin writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention, the flâneur understands the city as few of its inhabitants do, for he has memorised it with his feet. Every corner, alleyway and stairway has the ability to plunge him into rêverie. What happened here? Who passed by here? What does this place mean? The flâneur, attuned to the chords that vibrate throughout his city, knows without knowing. Every right begins as a privilege and Elkin sets out to reclaim this once-male privilege as a basic human right of the modern urban dweller — one that requires the resexing of flâneur into flâneuse: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Flâneuse [flanne-euhze], noun, from the French. Feminine form of flâneur [flanne-euhr], an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. That is an imaginary definition. Most French dictionaries don’t even include the word. The 1905 Littré does make an allowance for ‘flâneur, -euse’. Qui flâne. But the Dictionnaire Vivant de la Langue Française defines it, believe it or not, as a kind of lounge chair. Is that some kind of joke? The only kind of curious idling a woman does is lying down? This usage (slang of course) began around 1840 and peaked in the 1920s, but continues today: search for ‘flâneuse’ on Google Images and the word brings up a drawing of George Sand, a picture of a young woman sitting on a Parisian bench and a few images of outdoor furniture. [mairakalman_myfavoritethings5.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Art by Maira Kalman from [My Favorite Things](. Walking for Elkin, as for her marching army of women, is a wholly different matter. She offers her own tessellated definition of its raison d’être: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Why do I walk? I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it, my shadow always a little ahead of me on the pavement. I like being able to stop when I like, to lean against a building and make a note in my journal, or read an email, or send a text message, and for the world to stop while I do it. Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness. Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighbourhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There’s a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighbourhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party. Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind, and walking helps me sort them out. Solvitur ambulando, as they say. More than half a century before the trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd asserted that [“place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,”]( Elkin adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png] I walk because it confers — or restores — a feeling of placeness. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says a space becomes a place when through movement we invest it with meaning, when we see it as something to be perceived, apprehended, experienced. I walk because, somehow, it’s like reading. You’re privy to these lives and conversations that have nothing to do with yours, but you can eavesdrop on them. Sometimes it’s overcrowded; sometimes the voices are too loud. But there is always companionship. You are not alone. You walk in the city side by side with the living and the dead. [thejacket9.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Art by Dasha Tolstikova from [The Jacket]( by Kirsten Hall And yet this inevitable commingling with humanity, for all of its rewards, also exposes one of the most disquieting questions of modern life — what does it mean to be in motion, in public? Elkin writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png][This is] the key problem at the heart of the urban experience: are we individuals or are we part of the crowd? Do we want to stand out or blend in? Is that even possible? How do we — no matter what our gender — want to be seen in public? Do we want to attract or escape the gaze? Be independent and invisible? Remarkable or unremarked-upon? With an eye to her childhood and young adulthood in suburban America, Elkin reflects on how she awakened to the relationship between walking and agency, to the sense that self-propelled motion is a vital form of participation in the world on one’s own terms: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I became suspicious of an entirely vehicle-based culture; a culture that does not walk is bad for women. It makes a kind of authoritarian sense; a woman who doesn’t wonder — what it all adds up to, what her needs are, if they’re being met — won’t wander off from the family. The layout of the suburbs reinforces her boundaries: the neat grid, the nearby shopping centre, the endless loops of parkways, where the American adventure of the open road is tamed by the American dream. [aliceinwonderland_zwerger15.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for [a special edition of Alice in Wonderland](. But alongside this self-empowerment, this triumph of individualistic agency, walking confers upon the walker a perpendicular gift — a connection, embodied in the sinews rather than reasoned by the mind, to the constellation of other selves speckling the world. Elkin reflects on a semester abroad in Paris — the city in which she first fell in love with “the utter, total freedom unleashed from the act of putting one foot in front of the other” — during her time as a Barnard College student: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In those six months, the streets were transformed from places in between home and wherever I was going into a great passion. I drifted wherever they looked interesting, lured by the sight of a decaying wall, or colourful window boxes, or something intriguing down at the other end, which might be as pedestrian as a perpendicular street. Anything, any detail that suddenly loosened itself, would draw me towards it. Every turn I made was a reminder that the day was mine and I didn’t have to be anywhere I didn’t want to be. I had an astonishing immunity to responsibility, because I had no ambitions at all beyond doing only that which I found interesting. I remember when I’d take the métro two stops because I didn’t realise how close together everything was, how walkable Paris was. I had to walk around to understand where I was in space, how places related to each other. Some days I’d cover five miles or more, returning home with sore feet and a story or two for my room-mates. I saw things I’d never seen in New York. Beggars (Roma, I was told) who knelt rigidly in the street, heads bowed, holding signs asking for money, some with children, some with dogs; homeless people living in tents, under stairways, under arches. Every quaint Parisian nook had its corresponding misery. I turned off my New York apathy and gave what I could. Learning to see meant not being able to look away; to walk in the streets of Paris was to walk the thin line of fate that divided us from each other. Complement [Flâneuse]( a captivating read in its entirety, with Wind in the Willows author Kenneth Grahame on [walking as creative fuel]( and Robert Walser on [the art of walking]( then revisit the crowning curio of the peripatetic canon — Solnit’s [Wanderlust]( — and the story of [how the bicycle emancipated women](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving I pour tremendous time, thought, heart, and resources into Brain Pickings, which for thirteen years has remained free and ad-free, and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy, stimulation, and consolation in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](