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Ruminations for “The Colrain Quilt”– a documentation of the struggle of Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner to keep their home from being taken by the government for conscientious tax resistance. I start writing this piece in Germany where I have come to lead a workshop in Sound and Deep Ecology. I am reading books about the war in Bosnia, hoping to work with Bosnian refugees. Being in Germany, the symbol of War for my generation, I am flooded with thoughts about war, about people who go to war, who are caught in war, about the wages, the rages, the unspeakable and terrifyingly ordinary abuses and atrocities of war. Reflecting on what I understand and will never understand about the roots of war, I thread back to the green hills of Western Massachusetts, to Colrain and all the "fields": Greenfield, Springfield, Northfield where I experienced our community in action. I sit in sunshine on a stone bench looking out at the softly rolling hills above the Rhine and let images from the news and my memory flow and align. I remember the expressions on faces, Randy, Betsy, Wally and Juanita Nelson and so many others as they gathered in personal-as-political struggle in the hills back home. I think about how their committed action creates a bulwark against the contagion of war I am reading about. I see the set, scared faces of too-young soldiers with death in their hands in wars all over the world, and then I see the faces of young men buttressed behind uniforms at demonstrations I've experienced in my own country. I remember the purposeful blankness on the faces of the state police in front of the Colrain house and at rallies for this anti-war, tax resistance action. From my therapeutic work, I know that freezing the expressive music of our faces and bodies freezes the flow of our energy and our feelings and is yet another way to cultivate the roots of war. Thinking about Colrain, I can also hear the voices -- the constrained monotones of mediators and police, the bright buzz of conversation among the demonstrators, the splash of kids' laughter, the songs and speeches amplified through tinny loudspeakers echoing back from green hills and gardens. "No money for war. No support for war". And, sitting in sunshine at the edge of this little German town, I realize that people here had gardens like this when spring came during the war. And people in Bosnia had gardens like these last year and got out of bed eagerly in early light to see if the peas had popped from their pods, if the green beans had pushed up through the black soil, if that particular shade of Iris remembered from last Spring had arrived again. Bosnia. Germany. Colrain. How to hold the weave that threads from dead bodies to live flowers, from the harsh stench of war to the soft winds of the hills of home? What kind of quilt is this? Who does it cover? Who does it exclude? Who shivers at the edges, longing to be let in, like kids in bed together on a cold night? Who stands apart, shivering but resolute in some idea of separation from the warmth we give each other? It was very warm in the old Northfield auditorium the night of the Pete Seeger concert for the Colrain Action. The hall was a sonic steam bath. We sweated through it for love of the music and each other. The big-time action was over, but we knew it was not over. Like the "away" to which the world's garbage cannot be sent, the "over" for actions like this always to lead to yet another barrier to equity and justice. Is it always like this? I wondered. Wall after wall to be climbed and briefly in between, the gardens? From my seat on stage directly behind the microphone in the Northfield auditorium, I was in the energy backwash of the performances. I could look out past the backs of the singers, as each performer set off waves of response in the audience and I could see the faces of so many people I knew, reflecting my own history back to me. During the evening, I wiped my eyes again and again, awash in both sweat and tears. I have been gone a lot these past years, out of the country much of the time, and a full time graduate student when I have been home. I wasn't able to be part of an on-going affinity group, to take direct part in many of the inventive expressions that circled around that little house, but I did what I could do, sang when asked, and sometimes when not. That night in Northfield, sitting behind Pete Seeger, that energetic aging stick of a man, I experienced again the power of his commitment, still radiating out over all these years, weaving the audience to him voice to voice, heart to heart, mind to mind. It had been thirty years since I had been on stage with Pete and I was in my own backwash of memory, moved by unexpected layers of feeling. Here was my l960's self, the young singer that I had been, fervent, devoted, unscarred. I realized in a way I had not before, how profoundly Pete Seegar has influenced my life. I turned away from classical singing to folk music because of him. My early education in social justice and the power of song came from him. My later evolution into a therapist, melding music with healing, takes root in the irresistible flood of moral force that pours through his music, even though he is old, even though his own voice is almost gone. I really understood that night, how much I carry his legacy. I hope some of that energy flows through my music too. It is the same energy that I feel in so many of the people who make up the weave of the Colrain quilt. I gave a concert in Denmark in the winter of l991 and sang a song I had written for Randy and Betsy. That night, weaving threads of connection through music, as long ago, Pete taught me to do, I talked to the audience in the little black box theater in Copenhagen about what was going on in my home hills. I called the song "Quiet People", a meditation on the root of action and inner and outer peacefulness.
QUIET PEOPLE For Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner 4/15/89 Quiet people, living their lives,
Quiet people, living their lives
Sometimes a No is the action of Yes
Quiet people loving their lives
Sometimes a No is the action of Yes
Quiet people, living their lives |
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Molly Scott / Creative Resonance Institute / Sumitra Foundation & Sumitra Music Copyright: Molly Scott, Sumitra, 2004 |
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