A note of Introduction

Reading this as the first line, you wonder what I mean by Dreams of Turtle Island? The concept of Turtle Island is indigenous, a native name for the continent of North America.  By the same note it seems fitting to me to consider this little running commentary a dream, as I've always seen writing as the odd combination of trying to draw words from the void and connect them up in some pattern that is meaningful-dreamlike.  Whether it be from experience, or from the folds of my mind, this is nothing but the play of neurons, energy, and perception.  So dreams as an amalgamation of my experiences as I travel over the coming months seems fitting, whether they be at home in Los Estados Unidos, or in Mexico.  As we all stand on the shoulders of giants, as the cliche goes, so I stand with Gary Snyder and his perception of the Turtle Island concept, found in his Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry by the same name.  

"Turtle Island-the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have been living here for millenia, and reapplied by some of them to "North America" in recent years.  Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity."  

I sit at home in Tucson today, a final quiet Sunday morning in the beautiful, blooming Sonoran Desert; as I pack and slowly accumulate those few possessions and clothes that will accompany me on my journey.  A measure of anxiety builds, I feel it in my fingers as I type, in my stomach. I miss Tasha now and know I will miss the rest of my family in the coming months.  All these possessions I have surrounded myself with will drop away and will be consolidated to a backpack measured in cubic inches, not square feet.  Still, I am seeking a measurement of sorts for where I am and where I going.  Perhaps it is simply a touchstone that I seek to compensate for the unmoored feeling that I get as I board airplanes. Paul Bowles recalled Kafka when he wrote, "From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached." To cross into the steel tube and emerge in a marginally familiar place like DF (Distrito Federal, or Mexico City) in hours, not days or weeks or months, is infinitely disorienting.  It is that point I am reaching, the point of driving to see Dave and Shan and the kids, to taking the ride to the airport. To leaving the madness of the United States behind for the madness that is Mexico.  

We inevitably wake from dreams.  That crossing point for me, from one world to the other is notable.  It strikes me as fascinating that I am reversing the flow of migration that the world has never seen, this crossing into El Norte.  I have hovered along this border for so long, I have walked to the very line itself, and it is nothing but steel and barbed wire.  The water continues to flow north out of Mexico.  So we are building walls and reaching points at which we cannot turn back, whether they be climatic and ecological or social and political.  That is my dream, I guess.  Last night I was listening to Martin Luther King's Beyond Vietnam speech, given on April 4th, 1967.  Exactly a year before his death, he came to what for me is a truly earthly goal, "A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must be ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."  

Perhaps this is the turning point, perhaps we are bound not for some measure of extinction but some larger dream of Turtle Island.  So it begins for me.