A few weekends ago, I attended a few days of the 3rd Annual Geography of Hope, (click on the Blog title) hosted by Point Reyes Books with this year's theme as water. Our beloved Wendy Johnson served as the moderator for the first night's session, which gathered a motley crew of writers including writer/improv thespian Claire Peaslee, writer/independent publisher Malcolm Margolin, writer/surfer Thomas Farber, and former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. Talk of many things water ensued: first memories of water, the Hetch Hetchy dam and Yosemite valley, the playfulness of surfing, the sound of water, cranes, the vernal equinox and the lunar tug of water, and the subject that weighed heavy through the whole conference -- the tragic and magnificent display of water's power in Japan not many days before. We sent our thoughts and prayers across the Pacific.
The next few days of the conference were filled with a great range of writers, artists, scientists, children -- reading, singing, storytelling, thinking, discussing, eating, listening, dancing, drinking it all in. To attempt to encapsulate the conference would be foolhardy. Instead, a few quotes and poems...a taste.
"All Western politics are water politics in the end"
The old pond --
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
We sailed west-southwest seven miles or so, then made a left turn. Nothing to be seen in any direction except ocean, more ocean. At which point I began to feel sick, very sick [...] No, it wasn't the motion of the boat, or even the endlessly rising and falling horizon line. Rather, it was that I suddenly understood we were very far out to sea, that I could not handle the boat alone should anything happen to the skipper--and he was clearly quite depressed, down below working on a glass of whiskey. There at the helm, keeping the course he'd set, I knew we were less than a matchstick, not even a cork bobbing on that vastness where whales would be nothing in the vastness, on the relentless upwelling we were smoothly riding...
March 28, 2011
Geography of Hope. Impressions by Jonathan Wu
A few weekends ago, I attended a few days of the 3rd Annual Geography of Hope, (click on the Blog title) hosted by Point Reyes Books with this year's theme as water. Our beloved Wendy Johnson served as the moderator for the first night's session, which gathered a motley crew of writers including writer/improv thespian Claire Peaslee, writer/independent publisher Malcolm Margolin, writer/surfer Thomas Farber, and former US Poet Laureate Robert Hass. Talk of many things water ensued: first memories of water, the Hetch Hetchy dam and Yosemite valley, the playfulness of surfing, the sound of water, cranes, the vernal equinox and the lunar tug of water, and the subject that weighed heavy through the whole conference -- the tragic and magnificent display of water's power in Japan not many days before. We sent our thoughts and prayers across the Pacific.
The next few days of the conference were filled with a great range of writers, artists, scientists, children -- reading, singing, storytelling, thinking, discussing, eating, listening, dancing, drinking it all in. To attempt to encapsulate the conference would be foolhardy. Instead, a few quotes and poems...a taste.
"All Western politics are water politics in the end"
The old pond --
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
We sailed west-southwest seven miles or so, then made a left turn. Nothing to be seen in any direction except ocean, more ocean. At which point I began to feel sick, very sick [...] No, it wasn't the motion of the boat, or even the endlessly rising and falling horizon line. Rather, it was that I suddenly understood we were very far out to sea, that I could not handle the boat alone should anything happen to the skipper--and he was clearly quite depressed, down below working on a glass of whiskey. There at the helm, keeping the course he'd set, I knew we were less than a matchstick, not even a cork bobbing on that vastness where whales would be nothing in the vastness, on the relentless upwelling we were smoothly riding...
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