My great grandfather was a farmer.

My very German grandmother and grandfather,

were gardeners and canners.

Many cells of my body –

were formed eating food from their garden,

their cherry tree,

and their canned food.

My parents were gardeners.

Many cells of my body,

were formed from sweet corn,

grown in their yard.

Epi-genetics.

inheritance.

While I may know no German words.

I know what a German garden looks like.

Inheritance works in so many twisted ways.

Are planting tomatoes a dominant or recessive trait?

What about canning produce grown in the sun,

that falls on you while you work in a garden?

Of my siblings those who own land,

garden.

The few that don’t grow other things.

My sister grows planets in cyberspace.

My brother grows plants in window boxes.

My other sister grows pets.

The rest grow a variety of plants

Will those traits continue?

Will my grandchildren someday say,

its canning time,

excuse me while I pick some of those ripe tomatoes?

© words by Daniel DeMarle 5/27/21

The White Lion –

Don’t forget that name.

How many times have you heard that so and so,

is a distant relative of someone who came across,

on the Mayflower. You know that name!

The Mayflower, one of the most famous and mythic ships,

in the American cosmology.

Landing near Cape Cod with those Pilgrims in 1620.

We all know their god and worship.

Yet, while the First People were here with their religion and government

The Pilgrims were not the second.

What of the White Lion?

What you do not know about the 1st ship to bring people to America?

Could it be because their cargo had beautiful black skin?

That they were in truth the second people.

Yet those 20 or so people were from the Ndongo people,

in what is now Angola.

They were taken from Africa in the São João Bautista,

a Portuguese ship.

They probably gave praise when their ship was attacked,

by the English ship the White Lion.

They probably hoped and prayed that this meant their freedom,

for who could be so barbaric to reenslave newly enslaved people?

After defeating the Portuguese, the English sailors,

did not free them.

Imagine the tears!

As they were simply transferred from one hold to another.

To eventually be traded for food in the Virginia Colony.

What of their descendants?

Who are the descendants of those men and women,

who came to America in 1619 a year before,

those pious Pilgrims arrived.

What of the gods of the Ndongo people?

You know they were prayed to.

Why do we all not know of the White Lion?

We mostly know of the centuries of woe that the white men and women

who accepted that trade,

brought to this country.

Where are the monuments to the men and women of the White Lion?

Where are the memorials to their tears?

to our tears?

© words by Daniel DeMarle

Click here to learn more.

i was born in a place where we only saw two colors,

those colors were white and black.

i was born in a place where history was only taught,

from a white book,

where the world was paper-thin.

Where history was only two dimensional,

where only white men had agency,

where only white men made history.

i was born in a time where we watched Westerns,

where the white settlers or calvary,

were doing right by massacring first nation people,

both men, women, children, and infants.

It would be decades before I learned the term first nations.

There was no black in my life other than images on a screen.

It would be years before I knew someone who was not white.

I was born in a twisted and malformed world!

A world were you were taught 2+2 was 4;

but not cuatro, or أربعة or nne, or even ceathrar.

At some point, my foot and then I, fell through that paper-thin world.

I, like Dorothy, found a beautiful technicolor world;

of life, food, love, experience, and taste and oh so many glorious tastes,

and stories,

and lives,

and vibrancy,

and pathos and sorrow,

and JOY!

Let alone agency and power!

It’s amazing that I grew up in the shadow of the company,

that made Kodachrome,

but yet it took me decades to live in a Kodachrome world.

Today at the Doctors the receptionist was having a hard time getting the computer to print,

She made a comment about oh you know women,

I answered, Yes I know women are strong, and vibrant, and heroes and the foundation of this country.

She started to cry and later thanked me.

After I thought what system do we live in that a random stranger has to tell you a truth that is so,

true.

Yet the fact is,

the fact is,

that I myself, besides having strong women in my life,

did not know that about women,

until I could see more than white and black.

It’s a beautiful world,

Come see it with me.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 5/13/21

A quick note, I have seen lots of memes and posts lately about individual police officers being upstanding people on the job. I agree, I know some fantastic officers. That does not mean, however, that policing in the US is not racist, bad, and leads to very negative outcomes for primarily BIPOC. It is the system of policing, not police officers as a whole. We hear all the time that the problem is a few bad apples. No, the problem is a system that allows and encourages the behavior of a few bad apples and the rest of the system that oppresses BIPOC. When someone tampered with Tylenol in Chicago in 1982, we did not say oh it was just a few bad bottles. No, we re-manufactured the dang bottles and passed federal anti-tampering laws. Every time you struggle to take off a safety cap and safety seal on a new bottle, that is because “A total of seven people died in the original poisonings, with several more deaths in subsequent copycat crimes.” Around a dozen people died and we redid the entire system. All that because of a few bad apples. One attempted shoe boomer, and we end up taking all our shoes off to get on a plane. Billions of shoes on and off. Think of how many BIPOC have died at the hands of police, been incorrectly killed by the States, and spent years and decades behind bars. It is the system, NOT the officers. They just work the way the system designed their jobs to work. If you care about police officers, CHANGE THE D*(& SYSTEM!!! If you care about the blue line then change the D&^% system.

©words by Dan DeMarle 5/8/21

 

What is truly amazing is that humans live our lives like what we believe is true, when most of it isn’t. We believe in race, in class, that global warming isn’t true, that America’s form of government is the best in the world, in the dollar. in brand identities, in national boundaries, in thousands of different gods, that chocolate is not a drug, that men should control womens’ bodies, that there is a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans, that humans are the only intelligent species on earth, that there is no life other than us in the universe, that there is just one universe, that caffeine is not a drug, that we need to buy buy buy, and I could go on and on. Just think what humans believed 100 years ago, 100 before that, 100 before that, 100 before that. Most things believed 100 years ago were false, and even more were false 100 years before that, and even more…. The basic fact is that most of what we currently believe will be proven false or overthrown in another 50 let alone 100 years. So what this leads to, is the basic fact that why are we in such a rush to destroy the earth we live on. We are all basically on a starship traveling through space and right now there is no Planet B. Maybe we should all slow the F down and chill for a bit. Oh by the way, if what you believe is actually wrong, why not the hell cut everyone else some slack maybe try to live in peace and drop all the barriers we have thrown up between ourselves. At this point the way we are headed we are all just passengers on the Titanic. That is unless we unify overthrow the current Captains and turn this boat in another direction.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 3/29/21

When you spend all day outraged at the latest and newest outrage of the day, you can easily miss the beautiful things.

There is a beauty and excitement among all creatures great and small in waiting

Love, hope can be hidden and appear to be gone, but Spring will come with the sun.

Life persists despite things that can bury it, life persists and with sun and time it heals and grows.

Before the storm, there is a pause, a last minute scurrying, a checking of resources, then a settling into wait. Watch the birds they know this. The plants as well

Even while buried in a storm worth of snow, life, light, hope persist. In times of disaster and storm life knows to rest, to conserve energy to manage through. To use the resources wisely that have been carefully stored away in warmer days.

Like grief or trauma light and Spring can seem so far away while life is buried deeply under heavy, heavy snow.

Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas state, without passing through the liquid state. That is why the snow slowly just disappears. That is what will happen. If only grief and trauma, like snow, could disappear. But instead the injury goes from dark to bruised to discolored. Winter to Spring is a process of transformation. It’s a journey.

Life waits. Still buried, but still alive. This feels like the country right now with Covid. Still under the crushing weight, but knowing that soon we will be past it.

After snow and darkness life can feel broken and deformed but light and time lead to new growth and life

As the world turns and changes do we cuddle together for warmth for support? Is this our true nature – to live among others in communities of support? If indeed so, then what deep dysfunction keeps us from doing so?

There is no climatic battle, no blazing fight between seasons it is as simple as light bringing warmth more light with each rotation of the earth, and so with us with each rotation a day slips away. Live it well, live them all well. Love them well.

Warm now but bitter cold is moving in. As I take the picture one lone snowflake lands. Weather like life is sometimes suspended between choices and change.

Bulbs planted over a decade ago through multiple winters and seasons persist. How many have not? How many did not make it to this Spring, to this season? Life persists, but not for all. Imagine your garden with Spring flowers that come up every Spring for those you lost. Every spring for a few weeks or months they could blaze with color.

My Farmer friends already know we are in Mud season. How did we become so divorced from food and the land that we did not know that? What other things have we lost? What does the sometimes calamitous change of seasons nudge us to remember, to know, to learn? To forget?

When Spring finally arrives it brings storms and gusts of winds and traveling companions to set off with amid the flowers on another grand adventure.

End Chapter 1

© words and pictures by Daniel DeMarle Spring 2021

 

The great difficulty with white privilege is its sheer ubiquity and its sheer seductiveness. Imagine that you are a beautiful woman or man and people just open doors for you, offer their arms, offer you the best seating, you do not ask for it, but it just happens. After a while, you believe that you must deserve it, that it is yours by right. But it does not, it simply is a result of your youthful beauty. Also, the simple fact that your culture values your particular kind of beauty. You look around and see other beautiful people being treated the same way. Maybe you see that this is a system. Maybe you realize that the system may harm you. You are given the best seats because your presence advertises for and improves the brand of the restaurant you are in. They may put your picture up on the wall, to say beauty was here. You may not realize that there are entire groups of people who are excluded from this life through no fault of their own. Then someone throws water on you and says you are hurting people because of this system, a system you may or may not have realized was even there, a system you know that you did not set up. But by genetics or luck, your parents and grandparents were also beautiful people. They earned more money, were able to own more property because beauty can attract money. All of their earnings passed down to you, allowing you to go to better schools and to earn more yourself. Now you are asked to turn it down, to say this is not fair, that the system is wrong. Will you? or will you fight to maintain the system for your own beautiful children?

© words by Daniel DeMarle 2/15/21

I discovered that I had lost ….

I blame it on reading too much Scnhauer,

which left me feeling less.

So I listened to John Lennon,

and I found some rope and some dope,

but only a pocketful of ….

apparently nothing.

Well, at least I have this chest,

which used to be full of blankets,

but now just seems to be empty.

I am just full

that I soon will get back my .

© words by Daniel DeMarle with help from Hubert Van Toll 2/13/21

Is there such a thing,

as a perfect day,

a perfect moment?

Is this it?

It is nothing spectacular,

nothing memorable.

Just me in this certain mood,

with a mostly burnt sandwich,

and a sense that those I love,

are all doing well.

That tides have turned.

That if I died right now it would be a good way to end this book.

The book we call a life.

© words by Daniel DeMarle 2/7/2021