Skip to main content

So Kind of Restless

At the F.D.R. Memorial
"Jah, they are so kind of restless. . . ."

That is how Joseph Langland described the wave of immigrants that came from Norway, beginning in about 1815.

It might have been that poem--"Norwegian Rivers"--
that created an urge within me to write a poem of my own
for the 50th wedding anniversary of my parents:
"Where the Winds Blow West".

Our father was one of those immigrants in that river of folk
who crossed the Atlantic like an irresistible El Nino,
like a prevailing wind, like hunger and desire,
following our mother's parents and grandparents.
Joseph Langland, himself, a native of Minnesota,
had a name that identified him and the place from where his family had come;
our parents to Washington State, into the west wind.

There is not a human being in the world, anywhere, except in Africa,
who does not live in a place to which they or their ancestors have immigrated.
The most a few of us can do--and I am not one of them--
is to claim that our forebears came a fairly long time ago;
even the first peoples to this continent arrived here only a few thousand years ago.
Some of our immigrant neighbors did not even want to come here;
they came on slave ships, and some were lured by lies and lure of a Promised Land.

Some of our neighbors, some of us, have come very recently.
Some came to be with their parents, or their children.
Some to try to earn enough to stay alive, or to send money to build a house.
Some came to walk through the same desert trails to look for the bones of their predecessors;
their family; their friends.

We are migrators, we human beings.
We have walked and sailed almost everywhere.
Our bones are in the dirt, and in the rocks; in the sea.

We know that.
We know that all of us are African by human birth,
and that we walked across Europe, and Asia, and the Americas.
We have been so kind of restless.
We look up, as Teilhard de Chardin said, at the horizon
and see ourselves coming toward us,
and it scares us.

The glory of human restlessness and curiosity scares us,
so we pretend that what we are, and what we have done
in our families, and our history, is different,
and that we were here, if not first, then at least legitimately.

We make retrospective rules,
and ask the tailors of history and legislature
to cut something to suit us,
to make us look different.

Many of us come from,
or have come away from,
a religious tradition that began
with a migration out of Egypt,
across the Red Sea, to Palestine,
where Moses and Aaron promised
there would be a land of milk and honey:
no matter that there were people already there!
They claimed the land; are still claiming the land.

We are having a hard time being honest with ourselves.

We human immigrants.
We restless ones.
We with bunks in steerage.
Walkers across the Sinai
and the Sonora.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more