In
Memoriam Ruth
Slickman was dearly loved by many members of Amaterra. For many years she was
a constant supporter of the organization and a contributor to previous editions
of Earthcare. In her memory we wish to publish one of her writings from
the 1992 edition of Earthcare. Another
Endangered Species In the early sixties I picked up an old steamer trunk at an estate sale to accommodate the increasing volume of "stuff" a large family accumulates. That trunk is one of the few pieces from the big house that I have kept through the moves made since my husband died and the children followed their own destinies. Now it contains what tangible history remains of our family in letters, newspaper clippings, and snapshots I've holed away for years. My
mother wrote to her mother almost every week of her married
life until grandma died, and the letters were all saved in neat bundle and packed
in candy and stationery boxes - a whole inner chronology of a reticent Kansan
I knew as my mother, but not as a person until I read the letters years after
she was gone. I have the whole courtship of Daddy's sister Ethel by an older man
in the Railway Postal Service, whom she hardly knew when they married. The drama
and everyday life of a time when people recorded their thoughts on paper is a
legacy of family knowledge that gives me a continuity I could not have any other
way. The
convenience of the telephone has changed our mode of communication radically:
we are not patient people, and it is wonderful to have parents, children, and
friends at our fingertips. Information flies from one end of the continent to
the other without the laborious process of committing it to paper. I
mourn my own neglect of the written word, and the low-level disappointment I suffer
when the only twenty-nine cent mail in my box contains bills. My family and friends
are precious to me, and we call each other constantly. But there is still space
in my trunk, though I keep every scrap of correspondence I receive, trying to
make the record of my time available to those who come after me. Letters certainly
do not tell the whole story of a life, but they are the best hints and codes we
can leave: indications of an inner being, shadowy, perhaps, but clues to ponder. Christmas
cards have fallen out of favor in recent years, and rightly so if they are signed
and sent with a sense of obligation. But to me it's a Joy every year after Thanksgiving
to sit down with my disreputable old address book and thumb through its pages,
remembering and sending messages. I hope that next year I'll make the time to
communicate more often by word than by phone. Part of that resolution is pure
selfishness. I want letters. I want to touch them, reread them, and share the
unique communion with the other person that writing brings. -
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Letters are an endangered species of sorts, and I hope they don't slip away with the rainforests and the spotted owl. They bind us humans together with a grace and thoughtfulness that cannot be replaced by phone or video cassettes, and they are a necessary as clean air and water. We all need great gulps of this kind of communication to keep continuity in our sometimes fragmented lives. Purposeful Purposelessness The Little Valley in Spring A mountain
stream: even the stones make
songs - wild cherry trees. —Onitsura 1660-1783 I wake in the morning and think, "what must I do today?" The inevitable list is written. At the end of the day I look back at all the unfinished business and add it to tomorrow's list. Items crossed off my lists are a testimony to purpose and accomplishment. Yet there is a dark side to this obsession, an incompleteness: the burden of things not done. Each day, and each list, comes and goes and I am left with the uneasy feeling that there must be a better way of being. Of course there is the temptation to make shorter lists. My tomorrows would not be burdened with as much carryover baggage. However, this seems to be a strategy of regret. In looking back I'm afraid that life might seem emptier: lessened in some way by challenges not met. The answer to this dilemma always seems to come when I take time to look deeply at mountains, trees, and flowers — that world of nature outside my narrow sense of self. I ask the mountain, "what is your purpose?" The answer, "no purpose." Yet deep within there persists a notion that there is purpose here: something unperceived. Perhaps there is hidden purpose on a grander scale. Contemplating this natural world of mountains, trees, and flowers, I begin to expand my narrow sense of self and a deep mystery begins to unfold: the world of nature has "purposeful purposelessness." When I bring this "purposeful purposelessness into my own daily life the lists are not as oppressive: the regrets fewer. Somehow I feel that Onatsura must have traveled very lightly: a very refreshing way of living. — Roger Irwin
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